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Some Confessions 
of an Average Man 







SOME CONFESSIONS 
OF AN AVERAGE MAN 
BY RICHARD KING 



BOSTON 

SMALL, MAYNARD AND COMPANY 
PUBLISHERS 



3D 4 ; 
. t4 ns 


Copyright, 1923 

By SMALL, MAYNARD AND COMPANY 

(Incorporated) 





Printed in the United States of America 


THE MURRAY PRINTING COMPANY 
CAMBRIDGE, MASS. 

BOUND BY THE BOSTON BOOKBINDING COMPANY 
CAMBRIDGE, MASS, 

JUL 31 (924 

©CIA800320 



MOST BOOKS ARE DEDICATED TO PEOPLE. 
YET, IT APPEARS TO ME, THAT PLACES 
PLAY ALMOST AN EQUAL PART IN THE 
HAPPY MEMORIES OF LIFE. SO I DEDICATE 
THIS LITTLE BOOK TO THE COAST VILLAGES 
OF NORTH CORNWALL —OF WHICH I HAVE 
SO MANY HAPPY RECOLLECTIONS 


( 



























Contents 






PAGE 

The Average Man .... 


. 

. 

1 

The Passionate Cycle . 

# 



. 12 

Forlorn and Unimaginative Men and Women 



. 24 

On the Defensive .... 




. 30 

Pagan Sunshine .... 




. 34 

On Drivelling .... 




. 40 

Night-before Courage 




. 54 

Anchorage. 




. 60 

The Dullness of “ Doing it Now ” . 




. 64 

Old Friends for New 




. 69 

The Right to be Loved . 




. 76 

On Getting Back Home Again 




. 82 

The Sex-chains of Women 




. 86 

Ever-recurrent Doubt 




. 92 

Small Efforts are the Most Difficult 




. 98 

The Adventure of Life . 




. 104 

The Wrong Way to Look at Work 




. 110 

The Prose which so often Obscures the Poetry 


. 120 

One Way of Looking at a Debt Repaid 




. 126 

Clean Honesty of Youth 




. 130 

The Unimportant Glories 




. 135 

Loneliness 




. 137 

On Managing Other People . 




. 147 

God’s Hobby. 




. 152 

On Falling out of Love . 




. 154 









CONTENTS 


Moral Education by Excess . 




PAGE 

161 

The Danger of Carving Images 

# 

. 


168 

The Long-ago of Yesterday 



1 

170 

When we may proudly call Ourselves 

u 

Charming 


172 

The Angry Art of Plain Speaking . 


9 

. 

173 

The Extortionate Fees Demanded by Experience 

. 

176 

Our Self-worked Limelight . 


. 


178 

The Sailing of the “ Quest ” . 


# 

0 

182 

Time-clipped Wings .... 


. 


186 

Carnival . . . 

# 

# 

. 

191 

The “ Pompous ” and the “ Mere ” . 



. 

198 

On Hostesses who lose Touch with their Own Parties 

206 

On Getting into Society 

# 



210 

Those Whom We Forgive 

# 

# 


215 

The Virtue of an Unflattering Mirror 


m 

. 

219 

Mysteries — Real and Manufactured 


0 


227 

The Law of Ill-Luck 

# 

. 


232 

The Inarticulate Majority . 


. 


236 

The People we Dislike . 

9 

# 


240 

The Devastating Propinquity of Married 

Life 

. 

243 

The “ Secret ” we can never Impart 

0 

. ■ 


251 

The Religion of the Average Man . 

# 

# 


257 


viii 



Some Confessions 
of an Average Man 















The Average Man 

T? ^-CEPT on those more or less rare occasions 
when he is required to cheer, or applaud, 
or register his vote, or fight his country’s battles, 
the Great World ignores the Average Man. 
He is so very average. And there are so many 
of his prototypes everywhere. The earth seems 
over-full of him and his fellow-men, and the 
churchyards and cemeteries are crowded with 
his corpses. On his tombstone are engraved the 
words: “ Here lies the body of John Smith and 
Mary Ellen, his wife ” — and thus briefly is how 
we regard them when alive and remember them 
when dead. The Average Man is, metaphori¬ 
cally speaking, that “ blur ” of human faces 
which we see when we gaze out of a window into 
some crowded thoroughfare. He leaves no dis¬ 
tinct impression upon the mind, other than a 
vague surprise that, if God makes Man in His 
own image, He must be very unimaginative. 
Sometimes we ask ourselves the questions: 
Where the Average Man comes from? whither he 
is bound? why exactly he is born at all? A flock 
of sheep; ants running about an ant-hill; fish 
1 


SOME CONFESSIONS 

swimming in a tank, seem to possess as little 
separate individuality as the Average Man. He 
jostles us in the street; he fills the theatres, 
cinema and dance halls: millions of his kind are 
carried hither and thither daily on the railways; 
roundabouts, chars-a-bancs, switchback railways, 
tea-shops, the cheap reprint, the “ best seller,” 
the desiccated-soup tablet — were founded for 
his convenience, his amusement, or his nourish¬ 
ment. It is so arranged that thousands of him 
are born, brought up, educated somehow, and let 
loose upon the labour market daily; while the 
authorities see that even the epitaph on his tomb¬ 
stone shall conform strictly to the conventional 
faith and hope in a glorious Resurrection. True 
it is, that occasionally he obtains a certain 
ephemeral fame by murdering or being mur¬ 
dered, gaining the V.C. or being run over by an 
omnibus; but the fact, as chronicled in the popu¬ 
lar Press, obtains less space than the one which 
informs a thrilled world that while walking on 
the Terrace, the Prime Minister’s hat was blown 
off during yesterday’s gale and was last seen 
floating down the Thames in the direction of 
Greenwich. For the rest, he is just a plain 
Nobody, one of an immense crowd of Nobodies, 
whose value is only to be found in the aggregate 
2 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 


and who, as an individual, counts as practically 
nothing. 

What the Average Man really thinks is more 
or less a mystery. For one thing, he is not ex¬ 
pected to think at all — at least, he is not ex¬ 
pected to think for himself. His Betters are there 
to think for him. His convictions, taken en 
masse, are called Public Opinion, and his Bet¬ 
ters, unless Public Opinion synchronizes with 
their own point of view, refer to it with a sneer. 
It is something to be “ converted,” or, if conver¬ 
sion be impossible, then it must be suppressed. 
His Betters are never tired of constructing gates 
through which they invite the Average Man to 
follow them. If he refuses, or informs them 
rudely that the Land of Promise on the other 
side seems as dreary as the Land of Failure he is 
asked to quit, then, according to his Betters, the 
“ Country is going to the dogs.” And “ that’s all 
there is to that ” — according to them. 

What the Average Man feels in his owti heart 
is practically unknown. What he really thinks 
is even a greater mystery. Safely it may be 
asserted that his thoughts are nebulous for the 
most part. For constructive thinking he does 
not possess the necessary leisure. He is too 
much occupied by the problem of living ever to 
3 


SOME CONFESSIONS 


worry long over the problem of his being. What¬ 
ever happens — he accepts by making the best 
of it. He may protest to other average men, or 
he may approve; but whatever he may think in 
the confines of his own best parlour or the 
saloon-bar of his favourite pub, his thoughts 
rarely express themselves in action. To be un¬ 
conventional invites dire calamities, and Free¬ 
dom of Thought requires, at least, a private 
income of five hundred a year. But the Average 
Man has to keep within the good graces of his 
employer, and nothing ruins the chances of a 
humble employee more quickly than to look, 
act, or think unlike every one else. The Average 
Man may not be very wise, but experience has 
made him “ sly.” Besides, there is a certain 
wisdom in knowing instinctively the appropriate 
mask, and in that wisdom the Average Man is 
extremely “knowing.” 

But sometimes, when the Average Man feels 
himself secure of his company, the mask is 
doffed, and there is no greater surprise, or mo¬ 
ment of keener gratification in all that long, 
laborious study by which the student of human 
psychology seeks to appraise his fellow-men, 
than that moment of self-revelation. The mask 
is the mask of a slave, but behind it, furtively 
4 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 

maybe, but clearly nevertheless, the mind of the 
Average Man is wayward and free. His feet 
may tread wearily some office floor; some lonely 
furrow; some over-heated factory; his body may 
follow silently the long, long blind-alley of some 
relentless routine, but his mind is often on the 
hill-tops where the four winds of heaven allow no 
dusty convention to settle, no stale tradition to 
vitiate the freshness of the open spaces. He may 
look like one of those many millions, who all 
seem to have been turned out by some unimagi¬ 
native Creator from a common mould, but often, 
behind that dull, uninspiring aspect, there flashes 
occasional wisdom which, were it only to act 
according to the truth which it illuminates, 
would bring about the Millennium to-morrow. 
The private opinions of the Average Man are 
often so extraordinarily sane, that one of the 
mysteries of existence is how so much sanity can 
lend itself to projects so palpably cruel and 
idiotic, and accept without demur an unnatural 
fate so greatly at variance with natural laws. 
Alas! the trouble of the Average Man is that he 
is invariably inert until a crisis stirs his lethargy 
to action. His wisdom is the wisdom gained 
only by everyday experience — and that is the 
kind of wisdom which generally makes us wise 
5 


SOME CONFESSIONS 

when we are too age-weary to profit by it. 
Tyranny battens upon ignorance — and a wise 
old man, or a wise old woman, is a discounted 
quantity in the schemes of tyrants or the unjust 
law. Moreover, the Average Man is also un¬ 
imaginative. What does not immediately con¬ 
cern himself is no concern of his. He cannot 
perceive the truth that what concerns others 
will also, sooner or later, concern himself — even 
though indirectly. Not for him is the knowledge 
that the Future will only be the Past entering by 
another door unless we deliberately set out to 
bolt and bar its return. For the Average Man, 
the Past is forgotten, the Future doesn’t matter 
(he will probably, so he hopes, be dead before 
the next world-calamity happens), and the 
Present has to be lived through somehow — the 
jolliest way for preference. And this philosophy 
of his is at one and the same time his blessing as 
well as his curse. For it makes him the victim of 
any threadbare tradition; it makes him the easy 
prey of every political experimenter; it prevents 
him from altering Things-as-they-are to mould 
them after the ideal of Things-as-they-ought-to- 
be. Thus his children and his children’s children 
are led back into that morass of ignorance and 
muddle from which a vigorous and enlightened 
6 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 

preceding generation might have saved them. 

Valiant though the Average Man may be in 
the confines of his own best “ parlour,” as a 
member of the community he is extremely 
docile. Towards his self-professed Leaders his 
attitude is a curious mixture of admiration and 
indifference. They inhabit another world, and 
he has no imagination to perceive that the con¬ 
clusions at which they arrive in this other world 
will have a direct influence on the happiness and 
prosperity of his own. Whoever shouts loud 
enough and long enough is sure of an immense 
following among Average Men. As a thinker 
he is much more amenable to noise than logic. 
Whatever discord may masquerade as “ mel¬ 
ody,” the Average Man is always ready to pay 
the piper. He may protest; he may grumble; 
but he foots the bill on every occasion. No sac¬ 
rifice is too great for him, providing he is told 
that such a sacrifice is expected of him by his 
Betters. He is at once a hero and a child. The 
Arts are not for him. After his day’s work is 
done, he must amuse himself — or peradventure 
go mad. His work is generally monotonous 
enough in all conscience. In the few hours of 
liberty which are his daily allowance of life-as- 
it-should-be-lived, his spirit is too weary to soar 
7 


SOME CONFESSIONS 


very far. So it declines — and the public-house, 
the cheap cinema, trashy literature, jingly 
tunes, music-halls, race-meetings, among other 
recreations, prosper exceedingly on this mental 
descent through fatigue. Education alone might 
perhaps prove to him his importance as a human 
being. His Betters, however, see to it that it 
doesn’t. Regard the kind of education the 
Average Man receives! What is it, for the most 
part, but so many years of utter boredom, en¬ 
dured under a system of education which seems 
deliberately to make the acquirement of knowl¬ 
edge (such as it is!) the very dullest thing in life. 
And at the end of his term of enforced ennui — 
what has the Average Man learnt? Practically 
nothing which will be of any real service to him 
in after life. Because of his uselessness, he is 
obliged to fulfil duties requiring only the very 
rudiments of thought. And in the fulfilment of 
those duties he remains, more or less, all his life; 
until at last, one wonders if he can possibly be 
anything more than a kind of living machine — 
less free than the animals and infinitely less to 
be envied than they are. 

Yet only Fools treat the Average Man for the 
dull witless creature he so often appears to be. 
The Fools only perceive the World through their 
8 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 


own aspect — which is the aspect of their situa¬ 
tion in life, their class, their religion, the little 
niche they have made for themselves in that 
world which immediately surrounds them. The 
Fools regard those in a more lowly position as if 
their lowliness had denied them wisdom; as if 
they were of inferior clay; as if, in the Great 
Scheme, their importance was negligible. Noth¬ 
ing surprises them more than when they realize 
that the mean Average Man holds, and holds 
with all the strength of his convictions, an opin¬ 
ion contrary to their own. Because he is “ be¬ 
neath ” them in the worldly things which do not 
matter, except in a worldly sense, the Fools seek 
to blackmail the mean Average Man until he at 
least shows an outward compliance to what the 
Fools consider is for his benefit — which is gener¬ 
ally something which will continue to keep him 
“ mean ” and very average. And alas! the Aver¬ 
age Man is sly in his docility. He pretends to 
believe the Fools — and the Fools are supremely 
complaisant in their self-satisfaction. They be¬ 
lieve that the thinking is done entirely by the 
Great Ones of this earth. Whereas, the real 
thoughts — the thoughts which have helped to 
revolutionize the world — have fought their way 
upward from below, and are irresistible since 
9 


SOME CONFESSIONS 


they have sprung in the first instance from feel¬ 
ing and not from thought. Human progress 
has been made far more through suffering than 
through intelligence. But it is a long and up-hill 
progress, though in it the Average Man has 
played unconsciously the most important part. 
It takes generations of injustice before justice is 
even considered. Not until the concentrated 
misery of the Millions begins to make itself felt 
do their Betters realize that the best means to 
preserve their own prestige is to accord to the 
lowly their simple human rights. What the 
world will be To-morrow is born rarely in the 
minds of those in High Places, but in the minds 
and hearts of those living in the meanest thor¬ 
oughfares of the land. Advancement is fought 
for by those below and only accorded to them by 
those above — as a last resort; self-preservation, 
pretending an inspired magnanimity. The Mil¬ 
lions have out-grown most of those institutions 
which believe that they not only represent them, 
but lead them towards temporal and eternal sal¬ 
vation. The Human ideals so proudly uttered 
by statesmen, politicians, philosophers and 
priests, have been the inarticulated ideals of the 
Nobodies long before these individuals lent them 
voice. The Millions have to fight so long and so 
10 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 


strenuously merely to preserve life, that they 
never lose sight of the real essentials of exist¬ 
ence. Subtleties of thought or expression are 
not for them. All their life long must they meet 
and deal with the primary fact — plain, without 
intellectual “ trimmings/’ practical to a degree 
well-nigh commonplace. It has made them 
crude, but it has also made them honest. Tell 
me what the Lowly think to-day, and I will tell 
you what their Betters will think — nay, must 
think — to-morrow. Philosophers only give 
back to the world what the world has thought 
already and been unable to express. It is the 
same with politicians, writers, all those who 
place themselves at the head of mankind and 
pretend to direct its progress. They succeed 
only in so much as they “ voice ” the inarticulate 
yearnings of the common average man. For the 
convictions of the Average Man are convictions 
born of suffering, of injustice, sometimes of de¬ 
spair. His tragedy is that he has often to wait so 
long for some one who will voice his wrongs. In 
the meanwhile he falls an easy prey to those who 
would batten upon his helplessness, to those who 
would profit by his inability to express himself 
in words and his lethargy to explain himself in 
actions. 


11 


SOME CONFESSIONS 


The Passionate Cycle 

T^ROM the age of seventeen to forty-five, it 
^ may be said that the Average Man — and 
this, of course, also applies to the Average 
Woman — falls in love every three years. He 
may not fall desperately in love, but he is des¬ 
perately in earnest for just so long as his infatua¬ 
tion may last. And the “ affair ” nearly always 
begins in the same way. He is attracted by some 
one of the opposite sex. He assures himself that 
it is a very mild attraction, easily managed, and 
not at all likely to sweep him off his feet into 
that morass wherein lovers flounder, striving to 
find secure ground on which to build up a mutual 
life together. Sometimes he will disguise the 
preliminary symptoms by the word “friendship ” 
— a platonic affection, founded upon mutual in¬ 
terests, mutual enthusiasm, a love of beauty, or 
nature, or merely physical perfection. But at 
any moment, he feels that he could break away. 
He is so very sure of himself; so firm a master 
over his own emotions. Providing, too, that 
nothing untoward happens to the placid flow of 
12 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 

this quite disinterested passion, it may at last 
subside into that grey and pallid state in which 
dead infatuations of a very ephemeral kind live, 
only half-remembered by both men and women. 
But alas! — or, perhaps, we should say “ Thank 
Heaven,” since Love stirs up the turbid water 
of the most stagnant river of the day-by-day — 
something untoward does happen. A rival may 
appear on the field. Jealousy may be aroused. 
The slightest thing may turn a mild infatuation 
into a desperate love affair. And when he is in 
love, no man is master of himself any longer. 
That is the tragedy of it — or the blessing, 
whichever way you regard those periods of tem¬ 
porary madness which turn existence into a state 
of emotional unrest. At the beginning he never 
realized what was happening to him. He felt 
too sure of himself. His interest was just the 
interest of a man in a woman who pleased his 
fancy, a woman who seemed to understand him 
a little better than other women. Then came 
the moment when he discovered that he had to 
fight for that position in her affections of which, 
up till that moment, he felt so secure. From 
that instant he becomes a slave to love; and, 
whether it bring him happiness, or whether it 
bring him despair, or whether, at last, the agony 
13 


SOME CONFESSIONS 

too long drawn out breeds indifference, he is in 
each circumstance a feather blown hither and 
thither in the wind, a plaything in the hands of 
circumstance. 

The most humorous fact about falling in love 
is that we always deceive ourselves that we have 
fallen in love for the very last time. We may 
not be so dishonest with ourselves as to believe 
that the woman (or man) we love is absolutely 
our soul’s ideal, but we feel that he, or she, is 
the nearest to that ideal we shall ever encounter 
in this life, and, in any case, well worthy of all 
those sacrifices which Love, even Lust, demands. 
We think of the others we have loved; but, as 
we look back upon them, we only remember 
those things which we believe killed our adora¬ 
tion of them. We have numerous excuses. We 
may even laugh at the memory of those pro¬ 
testations which once we uttered — those dec¬ 
larations that not even death would divide us 
from those who held our heart and body so com¬ 
pletely in their hands. Nothing is quite so dead, 
or so humorous, as a dead infatuation. In the 
same way, nothing is so gloriously alive, or so 
utterly lacking in the rudiments of self-criticism, 
as the passion which now fills our hearts. It is 
real love at last, the more precious in that it has 
14 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 


been so long delayed. For it we are ready and 
willing to sacrifice everything, consecrate to it all 
that remains to us of our lives. Indeed, the 
more supreme the sacrifice, the more whole¬ 
hearted the consecration. Others may jeer at us, 
or condemn, or offer us battle; but the more they 
condemn, the more furious the fight, the more 
pride we feel in our love, the greater we will en¬ 
dure all things for love’s sake. The old adage, 
about true love never running smoothly, is only 
too true. If it did run smoothly, it would prob¬ 
ably change quickly into indifference. The 
reason why marriage is so often the death of 
love, is that it demands from us none of those 
dramatic sacrifices, sheds on our lives none of 
those startling limelight effects, by which, and 
in which, we feel we are holding the centre of the 
stage and Nature is merely the scenery and all 
the rest of humanity simply supers. It is a 
glorious feeling, an ecstatic moment, and with¬ 
out it life would seem only one long common¬ 
place round of eating, sleeping, working, being 
bored, and dying. Only when we are in love do 
We realize that life is gloriously worth while. So 
long as we are in love, there seems every justifi¬ 
cation to go on living. Otherwise . . . 

And yet, when we begin to fall out of love — 
15 


SOME CONFESSIONS 

what a relief, what a blessed, blessed relief! 
It is like coming through a serious illness, into 
the placid state of convalescence. “ Never, 
never again! ” we say to ourselves, as we once 
more pick up those threads of everyday existence 
where we threw them down — three, six, nine, 
months (eighteen months is generally the life 
of what the Average Man calls “ love ”)> per¬ 
haps two years ago. And how pleasant these 
threads now appear in their eternal drabness. 
Now we feel that we can once more live our own 
lives. In love, we sacrificed our own life for the 
happiness of another; or maybe we tried to dove¬ 
tail our own existence into theirs, in the belief 
that two destinies could be so commingled as to 
run as one. Experience taught us that each of us 
not only lives out his life alone, but, for the 
most part, must do so/ Love makes us believe 
that we can march towards death hand-in-hand 
and that even death will not sever the purely 
human tie. There is ecstasy in that belief; but 
alas! ecstasy is an ephemeral apotheosis. We 
are lucky if we can share even half of our real 
selves with another for very long. Most of us 
have to be content to find complete understand¬ 
ing here and there. God alone knows us as we 
know ourselves, and only He seems really to 
16 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 


know us, because in our happiness, in our pain, 
in our inner laughter and in our tears we seem to 
be sharing them with that mysterious Someone 
— who seems always to walk with us through 
life unseen; that mysterious Someone, who some¬ 
times we believe we have found in human flesh, 
calling that “ belief ” Love; but who yet seems 
to escape from us at last and becomes once more 
that “ unseen friend ” whom most of us think of 
when we think of God, and who never seems so 
real, so near to us, as when we are in trouble or 
alone. 

That is the reason why falling in love is some¬ 
times such a dangerous proceeding. When we 
are in love we “ give ourselves away ” so com¬ 
pletely. We think we understand; we believe 
that we understand; so the “ soul ” throws 
down the barriers which it erects in its own 
defence against the world, revealing to the loved 
one all its secrets, opening the door to all its 
most guarded sanctuaries. A kiss, a pressure of 
the hand, a look — by these things does the 
“ soul ” feel itself justified in its deliberate reve¬ 
lation. We mistake the language of Sex for the 
poetry of the mind. It is only when Sex has 
spoken that we realize that the “ soul ” behind has 
said nothing at all, nor ever had anything to tell 
17 


SOME CONFESSIONS 

us of those things which our own heart yearned 
so ardently to hear. And alas! there are no pre¬ 
cautionary measures. For sometimes — so little 
do we really know ourselves — we mistake our 
own sexual desires for the desire of the spirit to 
find communion with another’s. It is so fatally 
easy to clothe physical perfection with all those 
spiritual attributes which belong to the “ soul.” 
If every woman wore a yashmak until the eve of 
her wedding, there would be a great many en¬ 
gagements broken off at the last moment. When 
the world ispeaks of marriage as a lottery, it really 
means that, not until the sexual impulse is satis¬ 
fied, do a man and woman really know if their 
hearts and minds be in even quasi-communion. 
Which is distinctly unfortunate for lovers, since 
the world has so little sympathetic understand¬ 
ing for those who fall out of love — too late. If 
only people would look upon love as a kind of 
necessary but quite unimportant aberration — 
amounting almost to a disease — the tragedy of 
lovers who had ceased to love might then not be 
quite so terrible, such a very unforgivable mis¬ 
fortune. This may, of course, sound cynical; 
but then, we are all more or less cynical, when 
we are not in love, even though we are unshak- 
ably optimistic when we are. For the misfortune 
18 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 

of love is that it deceives lovers so successfully 
regarding its permanence. It seems to be 
founded upon rock, when in reality that rock is 
too often only a stage “ prop ” compiled chiefly 
of cotton-wool. Few people possess that under¬ 
standing pity which weeps for the fate of those 
who, believing they were building up a palace 
upon granite, have to face at last the fact that 
they must be content with a hutment built upon 
the sand. And yet it is better to build foolishly 
than never to build at all. Cynically though we 
may regard Love, its disillusions are the greatest 
educational factors in the growth of the soul. 
For you can never love without learning some¬ 
thing — even though it be only your own inca¬ 
pacity for sustained emotion. Love reveals far 
more than it obscures. The best that lies within 
you can find so few outlets in the hard, matter- 
of-fact, commonplace routine of the Everyday. 
For a brief period lovers live up to the “ best ” 
that lives within them, and the memory ought 
never to fill them with shame, though it may 
often fill them with regret — because it died too 
soon. The woman who has loved most forgives 
most readily — and what is sympathy but the 
capacity for forgiveness? For just so long as 
you have been in love, you have been unselfish, 
19 


SOME CONFESSIONS 


thoughtful, ready and willing for any self-sacri¬ 
fice; for an all-too-brief period you have wan¬ 
dered in spirit among the gods on Olympus. 
Without that passionate season you might have 
gone on your own selfish, smug, matter-of-fact 
way unheedful of the “ song within the song ” 
which is the symphony of living. You may have 
made a fool of yourself in the eyes of the world, 
but it was a divine folly — and because of it 
your soul has expanded and developed. It is 
comparatively unimportant whom you may love: 
the essential thing is to love at all. Without 
these periodical waves of exotic passion, your 
“ soul ” would rarely leave the earth. You may 
perhaps forget the ecstasy, but unconsciously it 
will have taught you many things in regard to 
the essentials of life and happiness. Only the 
complete fool ever regrets his folly. The wise 
man understands that without that deviation 
from the common and estimable round, he would 
not be so wise to-day. Love is at one and the 
same time a divine, as well as a tiresome “ inter¬ 
ruption but it is more “ divine ” than tire¬ 
some. It may make you swerve suddenly from 
that straight line along which you intend to pass 
your life, but sometimes the experience gained 
in the by-paths is the most valuable experience 
20 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 

of all. And Love is the only thing which will 
thrust certain men and women out of the soul- 
deadening “ rut ” of their everyday routine. 
And to be forced out of that “ rut ” from time to 
time is necessary to the soul’s salvation. You 
may come back to that “ rut ” with thankfulness 
in your heart, but though your return may find 
you sadder, it will certainly find you wiser, even 
though your wisdom be that tragic wisdom 
whose lessons are the lessons of delusion. After 
all, until you have suffered profoundly through 
love, you can never realize those quiet depths in 
which the essentials of a happy life exist. Until 
you have once loved desperately, unhappily, you 
can never know what real love may mean. The 
man who has never loved unwisely and too well, 
has never yet loved at all. Avoid love — if you 
can; but, having fallen in love, do not hesitate 
before the abyss, or to gain the heights to which 
it may eventually lead you. Nothing worth win¬ 
ning is worth winning without sacrifice, and even 
if the reward be unworthy of the sacrifice — the 
spiritual courage which lent that sacrifice strength 
will endure with you through all your life. So 
long as you can face the criticism of the world, in 
regard to yourself, unflinchingly, it matters little 
what sorry figure you may cut in the estimation 
21 


SOME CONFESSIONS 


of that world. The world can offer you nothing 
which you cannot find for yourself — if you try 
hard enough. And in love you so often find that 
precious possession which you have searched for 
and never before found. It may only be a 
“ glimpse/’ but after all, the second-best is gen¬ 
erally all that we ever do find in life that we may 
guard in perpetuity. 

It is all a question of the difference between 
anticipation and realization — and love is its 
finest example. But it is sometimes wonderful 
to consider what you can do with the second 
best, when once you have decided to make the 
best you can of it. Married people are adepts 
at this kind of game. They have to be if they are 
to continue to be married. The world may re¬ 
gard cynically the fact that the ecstasy of their 
early love has become the commonplace friend¬ 
ship of the married state, but that is because the 
world can never perceive there is a very essential 
blessedness in being merely commonplace. They 
have had their hour of ecstasy, and to all out¬ 
ward appearances it has passed away as com¬ 
pletely as if it had never been. But it hasn’t. 
They are guarding its memory: it will come to 
life again later on — not necessarily as passion, 
but in love for their children, for their fellow- 
22 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 


creatures. For love is a wonderful adventure — 
and always to venture is to gain knowledge. It 
may wreck your life from the point of view of 
your worldly estate, but to your own under¬ 
standing it is the one great influence which will 
strengthen and deepen, enlarge your sympathy 
and permit your inner vision to penetrate into 
the very heart of life. 


23 


SOME CONFESSIONS 


Forlorn and Unimaginative Men and Women 

rpHERE is a certain type of Woman for 
A whom I have never yet decided within 
myself if I feel contempt for her or a certain 
grudging admiration. It is the type of woman 
who has so far risen above the weakness of her 
sex that she cares not how she looks, nor what 
she does, so long as she did much the selfsame 
thing yesterday, the day before that, and almost 
as long as she can remember. At twenty-five, or 
round about that age, she gave up being young 
at all and became entirely “ middle-aged ” in the 
less broad and understanding significance of that 
period of life. Now at forty-five, or fifty, she 
seems to have renounced all hope of everything 
and to have resigned herself to the fact that she 
is “ on the shelf,” and that the prime duty of 
those who are thus situated is to deny themselves 
every sign of being merely human and to become 
just one of those who constitute the wall of un¬ 
aired “ wadding ” against which youth and new 
ideas, and every semblance of change, even for 
the better, hurl themselves entirely without suc¬ 
cess. She stalks through the world in ugly, but 
24 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 

comfortable, boots, dresses her body in any old 
garment — chosen, it would appear, because it 
displays all her less admirable points — and is to 
all intents and purposes a “ third sex,” with 
strong leanings toward the neuter gender. She 
is conservative, not through conviction, but 
through nature. There is nothing “ human ” 
about her; or, if there be, then she has for so 
long suppressed it, that it only reveals itself in a 
kind of furtive spite, a bold denial to others of 
any joy which has not been sanctified by moral 
tradition, dating from the era of religious perse¬ 
cution. She may be married, but she is generally 
a spinster, and every country village is her rural 
home, though her urban inclinations incline her 
towards Bath, or Bournemouth, or any of those 
inland watering-places wherein “ retired ” peo¬ 
ple form among themselves an exclusive society 
without any moral, social, or intellectual sig¬ 
nificance. To talk to her is like talking into 
“ space,” and the walls with which she has sur¬ 
rounded herself are topped by bits of broken 
glass which lacerate those who would venture to 
scale them or find ingress thereto by seeking 
sympathy. Whether there is a wild and lovely 
garden enclosed within those angry barriers, no 
one seems able to discover. No one ever pene- 
25 


SOME CONFESSIONS 


trates its solitude. I don’t think there is. You 
cannot grow flowers without their scent being 
wafted by the breeze so that the arid space sur¬ 
rounding them is exquisitely perfumed. The 
forlorn clothes these women wear are but a sym¬ 
bol of their own philosophy. They seem neither 
to ask for love, nor wish to give it. They cling 
desperately on to “ revealed religion ” and 
“ The Thing,” and by these things they live: 
it is apparently their only hold on life. 

Yet some time, in the dim long ago perhaps, 
these women — and there is also an identical 
male type — must have been young and joyous, 
and not above those human weaknesses which 
primarily belong to Sex, but are at all times so 
very pleasant, even if fraught with danger. 
Once upon a time, passion must have knocked 
at the door of their sanctuary, tempting them 
to come forth into the world and to live as men 
and women live who are only weak and human. 
Once upon a time their minds must have har¬ 
boured reprehensible thoughts, their hearts 
urged them towards the lure of unknown adven¬ 
ture, their “ soul ” cried out for “ light ” in the 
dark alleys of doubt along which at some time 
or other in life the “ soul ” is forced to wander. 
But their expression tells no tale; they seem 
26 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 


to have passed through the turmoil of their 
inner life unscarred by any of those conflicts 
which wage perpetual war within the confines 
of our own consciousness. There seems to be no 
living force within them, except the force to 
resist the onslaught of those things which do 
not merit resistance — at least, not a prolonged 
defensive. Perhaps they make vain efforts to 
preserve their right to belong to humanity by 
performing “ good work but because they 
seem to have no heart, and consequently scant 
sympathy and no understanding, they perform 
them in the wrong way, yet are too self-satisfied 
to perceive the miscarriage of their good inten¬ 
tions. Alone among those influences which 
struggle to render happier the human weal, are 
they persons gratx in those temples dedicated 
to dead faiths, outworn traditions and those 
whose fetish is an inward compliance to an out¬ 
ward respectability. 

There are times when I ask myself the ques¬ 
tion — Of what good is this type of man and 
woman to the human World? There are mo¬ 
ments when, hearing how the young and vigorous 
die gloriously, I wonder at the divinely inspired 
design which takes so much living potentiality 
and leaves so much spiritual atrophy behind to 
27 


SOME CONFESSIONS 

clog the wheels of human progress through its 
imperviousness to new ideas. For this type of 
man and woman is a clog on the wheels of 
progress. Any change, no matter how long 
overdue, is to them the only battle cry they ever 
hear. And hearing that cry, they cling mollusc¬ 
like to those old rocks, of which it can be said 
that the only beauty they possess lies in their 
age. They are those who live as if they believed 
far more firmly in the reality of the devil than in 
the charity of a God of Love. And yet, I sup¬ 
pose, they have their usefulness, as everybody 
has in this world — even though they may only 
represent a “ bad example.” Without them, the 
world might perhaps advance too quickly, and 
advancing in such haste, rush too blindly in the 
wrong direction. For, alas! it is a fact, that 
unless all men advance, none of them really 
gets much further. As the strength of a chain lies 
in its weakest link, so civilization must be 
judged, not by those in the front of progress, but 
by those in the rear. The human world must 
advance together, if it is ever to arrive at the 
Millennium. And the “ human wad ” — consti¬ 
tuted by this type of man and woman — is, as it 
were, a brake steadying the more impulsive 
idealists. The very spongelike quality of their 
28 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 

resistance is an incentive to new Ideas to gather 
greater and greater strength. There is nothing 
more encouraging to the frittering away of the 
fruits of success than success too easily obtained. 
Opposition is always the more powerful, since it 
is more concentrated. And the Human Wad is 
useful because it gives to Change, by opposing it, 
the time and opportunity to think, and in 
thinking it may purify its thoughts of much that 
is unessential, not to say trivial. So in the midst 
of the ever-recurrent bloodless revolutions by 
which Humanity is slowly working out its own 
salvation, the Human Wad sits quietly disap¬ 
proving and knits. Well, there is a certain 
subtle criticism in knitting — when you come to 
think of it. And that criticism is — that the 
world cannot turn its back deliberately on its 
own past; that the dead are never so really pow¬ 
erful as when they are dead — that their ideas 
tinge the thoughts of at least three generations 
who come after them, and that each age repre¬ 
sents in itself some acme of Truth, and that the 
Future, if it is to be perfect, will preserve to 
itself that vital Truth for which each succeeding 
age stood, embodying it into one perfect phi¬ 
losophy, or as nearly perfect as it is possible for 
preternaturally imperfect beings to live up to. 
29 


SOME CONFESSIONS 


On the Defensive 

H OW much happier life would be were we 
not always bound to be on the defensive 
when in communion with our brother men! 
We seem to live among people who are always 
preparing to pounce upon us, and so we have to 
pass our time endeavouring to escape capture. 
That beautiful ideal called “ family life ” is in 
eight cases out of ten a collection of people living 
under one roof, all trying to defend themselves 
from each other. We spend our lives perpet¬ 
ually excusing ourselves, or unnecessarily ex¬ 
plaining our motives, or fibbing our way out of 
those minor difficulties which, though they are of 
no importance, may quite easily land us in an 
unpleasant dilemma. Mary, for example, goes 
upstairs and locks herself in her room. A simple 
and ought-to-be quite an easily understood 
action. She wants to be by herself; she wants to 
think; she wants to lie on her bed and go to 
sleep. But before she goes upstairs, or when 
she returns to the bosom of her family, she will 
either have to state ( a ) that she didn’t feel very 
30 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 

well; ( b ) that, although she didn’t feel very 
well, she did not require a headache-powder, nor 
does she consider herself to be in need of a pro¬ 
longed course of somebody-or-other’s “ salts ”; 
(c) that she has letters to write; ( d ) that she is 
in the middle of an interesting book and wants 
to finish it — in fact, any reason except the one 
that she is “ fed up,” and is temporarily sick of 
her owii associates. Even then she will have to 
find a reason for ( a ) why she has a headache; 
( b ) why she can’t read downstairs in the draw¬ 
ing-room “ like a sensible person.” It is, of 
course, only a teeny-weeny example of what I 
will call the Perpetual Defensive through life, 
but, multiplied every day, it becomes at times a 
quite colossal nuisance! No wonder Mary 
yearns to go forth into the world to earn her own 
independence. Independence does mean a pos¬ 
sible truce in the daily defensive, and few people 
would willingly take in exchange the splendours 
of a royal palace for the blessing of their own 
bedroom with a good lock on the door. Not, of 
course, that one’s own room is the only way 
of escape. If you come to think about it, half 
the time spent in converse with our friends is 
passed in hiding from them our real thoughts, 
our real desires, what we were, what we are, 
31 


SOME CONFESSIONS 

what we long to be, why we did this, that, or 
the other — briefly, perpetually trimming our 
conversation in order that We may not get 
stuck on one of those porcupine quills which 
surround most people, and which they never 
seem weary of pointing in our direction in the 
fond hope that we shall become impaled thereon, 
and thus have to explain our position satisfac¬ 
torily and at close quarters. Dogs do not possess 
any of these porcupine characteristics; nor does 
Nature. That is why to be alone with them is at 
all times so eminently restful. We are full of 
astounding contradictions, but we suffer from 
that state far less than from the one which en¬ 
deavours frantically to dovetail these contradic¬ 
tions until they at least resemble some sort of a 
conventional whole. As we grow older we care 
less what people think of us — even our inti¬ 
mates. So we experience more of that happiness 
which consists in being natural — and let him 
who disapproves be hanged! It is one of the 
compensations for having to clamber up towards 
others sitting fat and comfortable upon “ the 
shelf.” But it is a very blessed compensation. 
Nevertheless, I always marvel at those people 
who, being “ found out,” waste their time ex¬ 
plaining their motives to a world which hasn’t 
32 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 


the slightest desire to believe them. If you’ve 
been “ found out,” your loss will for the most 
part be merely the loss of people whose opinion 
doesn’t matter to you. Moreover, it will at least 
cement the friendship of those who really do 
understand you and love you. There is a certain 
truth in the belief — expressed, if I remember 
rightly, by Mr. Norman Douglas in his book 
“ Alone ” — that it is necessary, every so often, 
to do something so outrageous that everybody 
except those who really know you, will drop 
your acquaintance like a hot brick. But few 
people possess the necessary courage to achieve 
this state of beatitude deliberately. Failing all 
else, they will write a book about themselves — 
a book in which they will appear as a pure white 
dove pursued by revengeful sparrows, a kind of 
crucified god going through an unmerited agony 
in exile or, peradventure, in Upper Tooting. 


33 


SOME CONFESSIONS 


Pagan Sunshine 

SPRING sunshine is a very pagan thing. At 
^ least it makes one feel pagan — and that 
in a life of one commonplace fact following 
another along the “ rut ” which so often seems 
to promise delight and generally manages only 
to reach complete boredom, is a most fascinating 
experience. It does us good to feel pagan from 
time to time; it does us more good to be pagan 
occasionally — even though, for the most part, 
we have to pay dearly for having danced to 
the tune of our desires. But that, after all, 
is better than never to dance at all. You’ve 
simply got to pay for playing in this world, but 
half the happy memories we store up for our old 
age over the fireside centre around just those 
circumstances at which people who are never 
tired of feeling holy horror at other people’s 
joys, feel the most holy horror. I never admire 
the Human Turnip, though ofttimes I envy 
him his placid repose. It must be strangely 
peaceful never to stir up, nor want to stir up, 
those primitive desires which some call “ original 
34 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 


sin ” and others designate as “ mud.” To have 
no “ past ” worth remembering, except in all 
mental torpidity, must make life an experience 
restfully monastic. And yet I’m not quite sure 
that the boats inside the harbour appreciate 
their security half as much as those which enter 
it battered after a long storm. At any rate, 
it is something to have weathered a storm, even 
if victory finds our dream-boats sadly in need 
of repair. You do, after all, know then what a 
storm is like, and a great emotional experience 
is never wasted — though it may leave you at 
last utterly weary, utterly worn out. The 
Temple we build up after the first Temple has 
been rudely blown to atoms by experience is at 
all times more solid than the one it replaces, 
even if less ornate; its foundations are firmer, 
even if the edifice itself resembles less the white 
perfection of a Christmas cake. After all, tears 
which we shed for lost illusions help to clear 
our vision and wash away a lot of dust — gold- 
dust though it be — from our eyes. The educa¬ 
tion is bitter at the time, but the knowledge 
gained thereby is worth a hundredfold that inno¬ 
cence which is ignorance — and so always a 
source of spiritual danger — which it supplants. 

And the first real Spring sunshine revives 
35 


SOME CONFESSIONS 


our pagan desires, all our reprehensible yearn¬ 
ings — reprehensible, that is, from the point of 
view of the parish beadle and the opinion of 
those gathered around the parish pump. We 
long to get away, right away, from all the drab¬ 
ness of our surroundings, to taste anew the 
joy of Youth — not the joy which youthful 
people know, but the joy which elderly people 
know should be theirs — if Youth but realized 
its blessings! As our winter clothes, which 
looked quite neat and tidy in the sunless 
months, now look worn and musty, so our heart 
seems musty too—with that mustiness which be¬ 
longs to a too long period of let’s-pretend-to-be- 
what-inwardly-we-are-convinced-we-are-not. In 
the Spring I want to burn my boats behind me; 
throw my cap over the nearest windmill, and 
escape — I know not exactly where, but far 
away from all the too familiar scenes and people 
which daily encompass me. I yearn for fresh 
surroundings, unknown faces; to be stirred by 
that spirit of adventure which sets forth against 
all advice towards some dream-goal, the realiz¬ 
able hope of which, even in our own hearts, car¬ 
ries no conviction. In our heart of hearts so 
many of us are tramps. That we don’t “ tramp ” 
is because we haven’t, as a rule, the necessary 
36 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 

courage. And what holds us back? Public 
Opinion, as symbolized in our friends and rela¬ 
tives, for one thing; the inner fear that, once 
having broken away from our moorings, we shall 
regret our lost anchorage; even such trivial 
things as some social engagement which we 
must keep next week; the friend who is coming 
to stay with us next month; even such important 
things as the “ boss ” who gives us our job; 
the protestation of our womenfolk, who can 
never realize that in the hearts of men the 
domestic hearth may not be, at all times, the 
only thing in life that matters; our children, 
who will ask us leading questions later on, and 
our near relations who will explain our “ ques¬ 
tionable conduct ” to them by grossly mislead¬ 
ing answers. In fact, a thousand and one major 
and minor details of our daily lives — details 
which we can rarely convince ourselves will not 
matter so much in a hundred years as they seem 
to matter now. Briefly, we are slaves to our 
habits and to our fears; yet the fact that we do 
live in slavery, more or less, does not prevent us 
from often hating our bonds, and despising 
ourselves for being held by them in thraldom. 

Life is a puzzling experience, not the least 
of its mystery being the realization that, what- 
37 


SOME CONFESSIONS 


ever we may do, we will regret. Ideals seem 
so often to be merely banners by which dis¬ 
illusion dazzles our eyes. The virtuous and con¬ 
ventional life seems to be too conventional to 
be really virtuous; rather like trying to live 
quietly in a suburban drawing-room with a 
monkey trying to get out. And the unconven¬ 
tional life is too much like living alone sur¬ 
rounded by nothing except monkeys — no mo¬ 
ment’s peace from one day to another. So most 
of us make a kind of forced compromise with 
convention. But if there be anything more 
unsatisfactory than a forced compromise, I 
should like to know what it is. 

I don’t suppose we shall ever experience real 
happiness until we live a second life — beginning 
with the knowledge we have gained in this. 
And the first touch of real Spring sunshine 
makes us yearn to live that second life — here 
and now. It is the season of revolutionary 
ideas. It is the season when both the joy of 
working to live and of living to work pales beside 
the desire to live simply to enjoy, and enjoying 
thus — to live. It is the season when good moral 
intentions seem nearer to hell than sheerer physi¬ 
cal joie de vivre. It is the season when to stand 
on a hill-top is to be nearer heaven than fulfilling 
38 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 

all the Ten Commandments in the market¬ 
place. It is the season when even God seems 
to enjoy Himself and laugh. Those who die 
in the Spring have surely a justifiable grudge 
against their destiny. Sad Spring often is — but 
with the sadness which comes from realizing 
that we have wasted far too many, and that 
they will never come again. We shall probably 
waste this one too. That is our way. Out¬ 
siders may not perhaps perceive any change in 
our mental outlook, but inwardly we shall all be 
sending them, and all they represent, to the 
devil. Our heart will be in the sunshine — we 
will be pagans utterly and deliriously, careless 
of anything but the sheer joy of being alive. 
Cur bodies, on the other hand, may be decked in 
a frock-coat and crowned by a top-hat. But 
don’t rely on spiritual sedateness from anybody 
when the orchards are gay with blossom and 
lambs are chasing each other across the fields. 

To quote from one of the poems of Bliss 
Carman:— 

Make me over Mother April, 

When the sap begins to stir! 

Make me man or make me woman, 

Make me oaf, or ape, or human, 

Cup of flower or cone of fir; 

Make me anything but neuter 
When the sap begins to stir! 

39 


SOME CONFESSIONS 


On Drivelling 

A MONG the minor tortures of the Every¬ 
day, I know none more poignant than the 
one which insists upon two or more people 
keeping up a polite flow of meaningless conversa¬ 
tion because they happen to find themselves 
enclosed in the same restricted space for a period 
of time. Most of us know far too many people, 
very few of whom we ever want to see again — 
or rather, very few of whom we should care 
two straws if they set sail for the farthest end 
of the Earth to-morrow. Among the smaller 
battles of my life is the one I wage against 
getting to know the people who immediately 
surround me. If only one could be invisible 
to mere acquaintances, and materialize only in 
the vision of our real friends! Acquaintances 
are sometimes delightful, if you pick them up 
en route or they happen to live not nearer than 
fifty miles from your own habitation; but the 
people who happen to know you because they 
live in the same street, or in the same village, 
or attend the same church — and because they 
40 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 

live near you, get to know all about you — 
these people rank high in the list of life’s daily 
annoyances. Apart from surreptitiously packing 
up your trunks and fleeing elsewhere in the 
dead of night, you cannot escape them: and, 
alas! wherever you may go, their prototypes are 
already living there all around you, ready to 
say “ good morning ” to you at the first oppor¬ 
tunity, inform you of the vagaries of the 
weather, and sooner or later ask you to lunch, 
tea or dinner; after which you are in their 
clutches for just so long as you remain in the 
vicinity. Of course, if they are charming, inter¬ 
esting, amusing people — the reward is enchant¬ 
ing. But when I write of “acquaintances,” I 
mean those hundreds of people who know you 
work in an office, or that you can only afford to 
keep one servant; that you hold eccentric views 
on religion or politics; but, because you may be 
useful to add to the babble of polite conversa¬ 
tion within four walls which they call their 
“ parties,” seek to drag you into the vortex of 
their own social amenities. You have nothing 
to say to them; they have nothing to say to 
you; you simply “know each other” and 
secretly bore each other exceedingly. But be¬ 
cause they know you, and believe they know 
41 


SOME CONFESSIONS 

all about you, whatever you say, do, or think, 
is criticized, until in exasperation at the un- 
sought-for interest which you have aroused in 
their minds, you retreat in anger behind a mask 
— the expression of which you know will please 
them, and the words which issue from it will 
be of just that platitudinous character by which 
alone you may live with them in peace and 
approbation. But is there anything more weari¬ 
some than having always to live behind a mask? 
With your friends you may be natural; with 
those acquaintances you make on your travels 
away from home, you may utter the truth as 
you realize it. The former understand you and 
love you as much for the qualities you lack 
as for the virtues you possess; the latter carry 
their own opinions of you so far away that you 
feel as indifferent to their criticism as if they 
were so many enemies or admirers living in 
Timbuctoo. But the people you are driven into 
knowing — not because you like them, but 
because you run across them so often — these 
are the people who interest you seldom, and 
really bore you at all times. They are like the 
average “ relation,” who only perceives the 
less admirable side of your character to hoard 
it up against the eventuality of your ever-pre- 
42 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 


suming virtue. Unlike the average relation, 
however, mere acquaintances criticize you 
behind your back; whereas relatives thoroughly 
enjoy being rude to each other face to face — 
that being the prerogative of a blood-tie. 

Oh, if only you might keep acquaintances 
on that pleasant friendly level on which you 
keep shopkeepers and those with whom you 
are brought into contact merely by way of life’s 
daily business! But you can’t. The descent 
from being an apparently amiable stranger into 
a most unamiable intimate bore, is direct. It 
starts with a casual introduction. It continues 
with a pleasantly expressed “good morning”; 
when you next meet them, your “ good morn¬ 
ing ” is perhaps so pleasant that, at the next 
encounter they ask you to lunch, or you are 
expected “ to call or they send you tickets 
for some dull concert. The end is that they 
eventually commandeer many hours of your life, 
so that you are forced to take their propinquity 
into consideration even when spending the day 
in bed. Should you “ drop ” them you turn 
them into enemies; but even though you may 
deluge them with that flow of personal gossip, 
punctuated by conventional inanities on things 
in general, called “ small talk,” you never turn 
43 


SOME CONFESSIONS 


them into real friends. There is no link between 
you except the link of a common environment and 
the fact that you know each other’s faces and a 
good deal of each other’s purely superficial life. 
It is the price we all have to pay for living in 
herds. I sometimes wonder if in Heaven we 
shall suddenly be accosted by people claiming 
acquaintance with us because they happened to 
have died next door. It will be tiresome if they 
do. For then, we shall have immediately to talk 
about the celestial weather or the angel choir, 
and if Mrs. Smith, who caused so great a scandal 
in Acacia Road by running off with Mrs. Brown’s 
husband, is there or in that other place to which 
the whole of Acacia Road condemned her when 
she eloped. The necessity of having for the sake 
of politeness and the desire to leave a “ decent 
impression,” to go on talking long after we have 
exhausted all we cared to say — talking to peo¬ 
ple to whom we have nothing to tell, nor from 
whom we have anything very much to learn — 
makes social life sometimes such an unutterably 
dull state that existence on a desert island, with 
just one, or at most two, real intimates, appears 
more like Heaven than any promise of belonging 
to the mighty cohorts of the Blessed. 

It always secretly amuses me when I hear 
44 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 

people declare that, for the sake of peace and 
quietness, they are determined to go and live 
in the depths of the country. From the point 
of view of sheer noise, the country is of course 
a haven of repose. But there is an even greater 
noise, though it does not deafen us maybe — 
and that is the “ noise ” which people make 
when they live in close proximity to each other 
and know each other too well. Vultures leave the 
bones of their victims comparatively “ meaty ” 
in comparison with what is left in the way of 
“ privacy ” after country society has finished 
picking a stranger in their midst to pieces. You 
say: “ Well, what does it matter what people 
think of you?” It is quite true in theory. But 
in practice it is of great importance. People, 
although you may be perfectly indifferent to 
them personally, can annoy you in a million 
subtle ways. Though all you may ask of the 
world is the opportunity to live out your own 
life in your own way, it takes almost a lifetime 
of experience before you realize that you have 
demanded the well-nigh impossible. Independ¬ 
ence of thought, of action, is a direct challenge 
to the world — a subtle kind of declaration that 
the rest of the world is all wrong. So the world 
tries to justify itself in its own eyes by adding 
45 


SOME CONFESSIONS 


to your discomfiture — and uncomfortable it 
always manages to make you, unless you have 
the moral, spiritual and social hide of a 
rhinoceros. 

In England, London is perhaps the only place 
in which a man and woman may live independ¬ 
ently and at peace. What noise there is, is 
the noise of traffic, of all those hundred and one 
mysterious sounds which make up the rumbling 
symphony of a big city. But though your 
sense of hearing may be disturbed thereby, your 
mind can live freely nevertheless, your person¬ 
ality develop in peace. In London you are not 
hurled into the arms of your next-door neighbour 
simply because he happens to live next door. 
Should you desire to know him, it is either 
through your own wish or by your own fault. 
London is so large that you need only know the 
people with whom you especially desire to be 
friendly. In London you may cut down your 
acquaintanceship with the people you don’t care 
about particularly to an enchanting minimum. 
The fact that you, yourself, happen to live 
in Chelsea, and the acquaintance who doesn’t 
interest you lives in Balham, obviates any 
necessity for being “ charming ” to him beyond 
the ten minutes of some chance meeting — a 
46 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 

period of time in which only the utter boor 
cannot give of his most gushing form of amia¬ 
bility. The acquaintance will take leave of you 
believing that, granted the chance to live in 
closer proximity, you might both become inti¬ 
mate. As a consequence, he looks upon you 
favourably. It is impossible to keep up that 
polite fetish when you happen to live in Little 
Puddleton and the “ bore ” lives in Greater Pud- 
dleton — only three miles away. In the country 
you are forced to guard your privacy with 
“ white lies ” — all of which can quite easily be 
found out. In London you can live “ lost ” to 
all except those few who know you and love you, 
whom you know and love so greatly in return. 
Thus you may follow up the bent of your charac¬ 
ter without having always to explain your mo¬ 
tives to people who can’t understand them, or, 
if that be impossible — at least pretend they 
don’t. Briefly, in London you can lead your own 
life, or as much of your own life as it is possible 
to lead otherwise than alone on a desert island. 
In the country, you have, for the sake of peace 
and quietness, to lead the life led by other 
people — a life sanctified by all the tin-pot social 
deities of the place. In London you can live 
comparatively unknown and so unwatched. In 
47 


SOME CONFESSIONS 


the country you must perforce live in the public 
view and are patronized according to the satis¬ 
faction felt for your life and your ideas by the 
Lord of the Manor House, or whoever may be 
the nearest approach to God Almighty in the 
district. In London people are “ dropped,” 
taken up again, and “ dropped ” once more so 
rapidly that there is hardly time or opportunity 
to show rancour. Besides, other people, perhaps 
more delightful, are ready to receive you and 
be by you received. In the country, to be 
“ dropped ” is to be also ostracised: there only 
remains for your entertainment the dull ameni¬ 
ties of the golf club, the annual “ bun fight ” 
in the rectory garden, and the society of the 
local practitioner and lawyer — who can’t afford 
to bow too humbly to the decrees of social 
benediction or expulsion. 

No, the only way in which it is possible to find 
happiness in the country is to have attained 
to that philosophy which finds cows, sheep, in 
fact all animal life, so much more companion¬ 
able than the average human being; to appre¬ 
ciate the beauty and variety of Nature so in¬ 
tensely that the sight of anyone more elegant 
than a rustic is as a blot upon the landscape: to 
live among your own thoughts, your own books, 
48 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 


visited only by those few real friends whom 
to be with is as a sudden deepening of the soul, 
a realization of all that is best in your nature 
— a reflection of your inner self; a sharing of 
all those hidden dreams which haunt you in 
the silences of life, and sing, as it were, a kind 
of love-song in the midst of those prosaic com¬ 
monplace daily acts which the empty babble of 
human tongues accompany so effectively. 

For my own part, I am in the midst of an 
experiment — an experiment by which I hope 
eventually to find peace, and to recover what 
seemed at one time to be my lost joie de vivre. 
I am striving to prune my life of its unessentials, 
—the unessentials of mere outward show, the 
unessentials of mere hollow friendships. So 
much money is spent on things which are only 
for the gratification or envy of other people, 
that most of us have little or nothing left over 
to do the things we really yearn to do, see the 
places we have always longed to see, travel, 
amuse ourselves, enjoy life as it should be en¬ 
joyed. So many of us waste the precious hours 
of life twaddling to or propitiating people who 
have no real interest in us, as we have no real 
interest in them. I have left the throng of mere 
acquaintances fifty miles behind me, and am try- 
49 


SOME CONFESSIONS 


ing to live my life among people whose philos¬ 
ophy I understand, undisturbed by the crowd 
who neither share my interests nor have the very 
least desire even to know what they are. I face 
whole days now in which my loudest song of 
thanksgiving is that, so far as I can know, 
nobody is likely to disturb me — except those 
people whose advent is as an additional joy to 
the Every-day. Because I have politely fled 
from the “ hosts of Mrs. Browns,” I can live 
more simply, more economically and infinitely 
happier. I never feel lonely, — or rather, not 
half so lonely as when I am secreted with “ Mrs. 
Brown ” and her friends, talking over “ other 
people ” or airing superficial opinions concerning 
new novels, new plays; hunting for one conver¬ 
sational topic after another, with one mental eye 
on the conventions of polite conversation, and 
one actual eye on the clock. 

So far my experiment has been an immense 
success. 

But I am beginning to realize that I shall 
have to fight for my happiness — as we always 
have to do, sooner or later. Already scarcely 
a week passes but I receive a letter from this 
metaphorical “ Mrs. Brown,” informing me that 
a “ dear friend ” of hers, Miss Blankington, 
50 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 

has come to live “ quite near me,” and will I be 
sure to “ call ” upon her, as she, Mrs. Brown, 
is certain we shall both find “ heaps of things 
in common.” It will take me all my time to 
avoid meeting “ Miss Blankington,” and I shall 
probably offend her if I do; but better far 
refuse to know people than know them only 
to ignore them later on. You can’t be too 
particular — I don’t mean in any “snobbish” 
sense, of course — regarding the acquaintances 
you make within a radius of twenty-one miles. 
“ Miss Blankington ” may possibly be quite a 
delightful woman, but in knowing her I shall 
have to know, or rather I shall get to know, 
most of her “ set.” That is inevitable. I 
shall receive invitations to lunch, or dinner; 
to play bridge, golf, tennis, even to be a guest 
at that truly appalling form of country enter¬ 
tainment — a “ garden party.” Eventually the 
last state will be even worse than the first one. 
So I will be adamant. I will develop “ incipient 
insanity ” in order to keep Miss Blankington 
and her “ set ” from my doors. I will have 
none of them. I will, indeed, make my own 
“ set,” and in it shall be just those people with 
whom I can be completely natural, neither 
pretending to be what I am not, nor ashamed 
51 


SOME CONFESSIONS 

to acknowledge what I am. The world is so 
wide; it promises so much adventure; life is 
so fleeting and so wonderful, that I will not 
be hampered in my movements nor in my 
thoughts, by people who are as a halter around 
the neck of personal freedom. All men are 
my brothers, and those among them to whom 
I am drawn irresistibly will actually be my 
“ brothers ” — we will talk, and laugh, and live 
together in understanding, and I will seek them 
wheresoever they may be, and clasp their hands 
in friendship, whosoever they are. After all, 
we can choose our friends — our acquaintances 
are chosen for us, unless we are extremely care¬ 
ful, on such unstable grounds as propinquity, 
or because they know some one who knows 
us, or because they met us at Mrs. Brown’s 
At Home, or because — oh, because of anything 
which contains no particular reason for a renewal 
of convivialities. Mere acquaintances at all 
times add very little to the entertainment of 
life — when you come to think about them; and 
the devastating boredom they inflict — requires 
no thought at all. It is there — staring at us 
among our morning letters, when we go out, 
when we return — at nearly every moment of 
our lives, and most of all when we least want 
52 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 


to find it. But it is our own fault after all. 
We know too many people, and restrict our 
choice too much to one special “ set/’ to one 
particular type, to one recognized class. No 
wonder so many people are secretly bored. 
They merit no deeper spiritual state. 


S3 


SOME CONFESSIONS 


Night-before Courage 

rpo dare and do — or to renounce and pre- 
* tend happiness in resignation . . . that is 
a battle which so many of us have to wage all 
through life, a problem which repeats itself 
from adolescence to the grave. Always we are 
met by that question: Shall I risk all and hope 
for success, or shall I risk nothing and be certain 
at least of a drab-coloured peace of mind? 
Renunciation is at all times such a desolate kind 
of victory, and yet even a desolate kind of 
victory, we think, is better than an irretrievable 
defeat. The luckier kind of people have either 
their desires so subdued by their conscience that 
there is no life in them at all, or are those who 
have strong desires and practically no conscience 
worth considering. But, alas! the majority of 
us have only a semi-developed conscience — just 
enough, in fact, to make our wishes often feel 
actively uncomfortable, and not enough to bury 
them decently and in order. We are continually 
in the throes of some inner conflict, and, except 
when we are asleep, there seems no period of 
reprieve. “ Thou-ought-not ” is always the un- 
54 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 


invited “ skeleton ” at our parties of desire. We 
have only to yearn madly to do something, for 
this “ skeleton ” to rattle his dry bones. Of 
course, some people can seize the skeleton and 
thrust him inside the family cupboard where 
other skeletons are kept — thrust him in and 
lock the door, throwing the key out of the 
nearest window. But these are the purely selfish 
people, born with a conscience which doesn’t 
show signs of life except within the shadow of 
death — a moment when even the most sluggish 
endeavours to sprout angel’s wings and cry, 
“ God, forgive me, for I know not what I did.” 
The majority among us are not built on those 
straight and rigid lines. We rarely leap before 
we look, and afterwards demand pardon for our 
impetuosity. Metaphorically speaking, we spend 
our time gaily galloping towards the hedge, look¬ 
ing over it, taking fright, and galloping back 
again in a panic; running forward once more — 
eventually falling off into the mud on this side, 
cursing ourselves for our timidity, yet doing the 
selfsame thing again the next time, and over 
again once more. As “ examples ” we are at all 
times unsatisfactory, and, whether as pseudo¬ 
victors or actual victims, are ourselves equally 
unsatisfied. 


SS 


SOME CONFESSIONS 

We have no definite line of conduct; or, if 
we have, it is a zigzag line — first going this way, 
then that. We are always, as it were, seeing a 
“goal” — making for it, hesitating half-way, 
and turning our back on it, grumbling at that 
lack of initial impetus which might have carried 
us to our journey’s end in spite of ourselves. So 
in our Garden of Happiness we flounder about 
— half-suspecting that it should not be a “ gar¬ 
den ” at all, but a kind of bleak wilderness, in the 
middle of which we are on our knees thanking 
some mysterious deity that we did not do what 
other men might have done. We do not resist 
temptation so much as play with it; and that is 
the most unhappy way of dealing with it. The 
fact is, our spiritual vision changes — not only 
with the periods of our life, but during the 
briefer period of the daily twenty-four hours. 
What we yearn to do at midnight we thank 
heaven we resisted at midday. On the other 
hand, what we resisted at midday we call our¬ 
selves “ fools ” for resisting after supper. Even 
the sun affects us. We are influenced by so many 
things which, according to the probity which we 
profess, ought not to have the least effect upon 
us. We are creatures of impulse — and that im¬ 
pulse is guided by the purest chance. We may 
56 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 


escape or we may be captured — but both our 
escape and our capture consist, in nine cases out 
of ten, of sheer good luck or bad. Given the 
time, and the place, and the mood — and I would 
not go bail for any saint in Christendom. The 
only chance most of us have to be saved from 
ourselves is to shut ourselves away within four 
thick walls and keep our eye fixed on the stars, 
in dread that our gaze may wander somewhere 
else. Which fact ought to make people very 
gentle and kind to one another. But it doesn’t! 
Aren't we a strange mixture of good intentions 
and most reprehensible activities? 

Sometimes I think that the happiest of us all 
is he who is little but a human “ turnip ” — fat, 
solid, and tasteless. These people don’t, of 
course, know that they are happy — because 
they don’t usually know what happiness is. To 
eat, drink, sleep, and to have time to worship the 
conventions, is all they ask of life, and life pun¬ 
ishes their modesty by giving them all these 
things — and nothing else. Rightly or wrongly, 
we have to give of ourselves, and give again and 
again, if we wish to get anything real out of 
life. We have to pay the price of every happi¬ 
ness we receive — and sometimes the payment 
seems excessive. But what matter? A little 
57 


SOME CONFESSIONS 


island of sheer bliss is worth an ocean of tears. 
Even if that island sinks like Atlantis of old to 
the bottom of the sea, its memory is as the mem¬ 
ory of Elysium, and a happy memory is some¬ 
thing of which no one can rob us, though we live 
to the age of Methuselah. The true growth of 
the soul is through weeping, and there is no 
laughter so fraught with relief as the laughter 
which follows tears. We can never be truly 
happy until we have truly suffered, a fact which 
makes the smiles of age more wonderful than all 
the careless joyfulness of youth. 

Happiness, like liberty, has to be earned to 
be fully enjoyed. It may not be that careless, 
rollicking emotion which young people know, 
but, though its outward expression may be more 
subdued, its significance is deeper — its precious¬ 
ness infinitely more to be valued. But to find 
happiness one has to dare, as well as endure. It 
is the reward life gives us for our courage and 
our endurance; and though that reward often 
seems tardy in its coming, I do believe that it 
eventually comes to all of us at last — to all 
of us who have voluntarily paid the price. 

The reason why so many people are unhappy 
all their lives is just because they have not 
developed this courage, because they have mis- 
58 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 


taken a discontented resignation for a divine 
afflatus. Towards the ultimate realization of all 
those things upon which their hearts have cen¬ 
tred, they have deliberately stopped at Halfway 
House. So they do not even achieve the ver¬ 
itable contentment of mind of those who have 
never started, nor find that inner happiness, 
that precious truth, which those discover who 
carve out their destiny towards some definite 
appointed end and joyfully take the conse¬ 
quences of their acts. So they live in inner 
discontent, grumbling at the colourlessness of 
their fate, and die, not so much in the hope of a 
glorious resurrection or philosophically content 
to leave Life after Death where it should be left 
— until after death, as puzzled, wondering why 
exactly they were ever born at all, and why Life 
has meant in their case so very little. Their 
courage has been the courage of the night 
before; their cowardice of to-day. 


59 


SOME CONFESSIONS 


Anchorage 

T T NTIL the spirit has found an anchorage, it 
^ is impossible to build up one’s life round 
that inner happiness which perhaps is the only- 
permanent happiness any of us ever know. One 
of the reasons why, in this modern world of 
greater universal comfort, of more definite en¬ 
lightenment, there seems so little real happiness 
in most people’s lives is because so many of the 
“ anchors ” to which men once secured their 
hopes seem to have left their moorings, allowing 
them to drift hopelessly at sea on a metaphorical 
Atlantic liner of luxurious appointments. Unfor¬ 
tunately, you cannot deliberately set forth to 
discover that glorious faith around which you 
may build up the temple of your dreams. It is 
useless to tell people that they will find comfort 
in religion, or in the succouring of less fortunate 
men, or in science, or in learning, or even in 
so-called social amusements. They may; on the 
other hand, they may not. It takes many, many 
years of a man’s life before he becomes a phil¬ 
osopher, and even then his philosophy may be 
60 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 

nothing more than that dreary state of the soul 
which in despair has resigned itself to laughing 
at everything. We all want to climb; our misery 
is that so many of us find nothing worth climbing 
after. But don’t despise us; especially do not 
deride. We are not happy. We are not so happy 
as the man who, in his ignorance, will readily 
believe anything. We all yearn to believe in 
something, in some one, in some big magnificent 
“ essential.” That so many of us throw our¬ 
selves deliberately into the vortex of worldly 
pleasures is often a sign that the “ soul ” has lost 
its anchorage and is drifting anywhere — any¬ 
where, so long as it is drugged into forgetfulness. 
And this is what so many people are seeking — 
drugs; not the actual drug, but some ephemeral 
joy which will hide from them the fact that their 
own lives and the lives of all men seem to possess 
so little raison d'etre. Their wagon is hitched on 
to no resplendent star. The modern world is full 
of the spiritually “homeless.” Most of us know 
just sufficient to make us lonely and desolate, 
and have not enough real knowledge to lend 
security to our hope. We live, as it were, in that 
transition stage between a blind faith discarded 
and the glimmer of a possible scientific enlight¬ 
enment— and a period of transition, like a 
61 


SOME CONFESSIONS 

period of suspense, is the most unhappy state 
of all. 

The War gave the world something big to live 
and to die for. It was caused by all that is worst 
in the human world, but its tragedy brought 
forth, nevertheless, all that is best in it. It 
bound humanity together in the one common 
link of suffering and loss. We fought, we gave 
unselfishly; we offered ourselves in sacrifice, not 
only that the War might be won, but, more espe¬ 
cially, that peace might realize so many of those 
dreams of a “ heaven upon earth/’ that Millen¬ 
nium which would more than atone for all the 
misery and beastliness of the most terrible war 
the world has ever known. But alas! the peace 
has disappointed us, proved the greatest illusion 
of all. The “ soul ” of men seemed at one time 
to see daylight, but the vision has been obscured. 
We are being led back once more into those old 
“ ruts ” which lead eventually to more war, 
more unnecessary suffering, more unutterable 
woe. And the average man is powerless. But 
the world is not without hope. The world after 
all has seen a “ vision,” and the memory of it 
will one day provide the necessary spiritual 
strength by which its beauty may be realized. 
The tragedy is that all those many millions who 
62 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 


still “ remember ” find themselves powerless to 
realize their aspirations. They possess no “ an¬ 
chorage/’ other than the memory of the horror 
and devastation that is past. Humanity needs a 
new “battle cry,” a new inspiration. The spirit 
of men is alive to all that is best in religion and 
politics, but the “ spirit ” is adrift, awaiting a 
leader, seeking a central authority around which 
it can build up the realization of its dream of a 
new and finer civilization. There is comfort to 
be drawn even from the fact of the present world 
unrest. It may seem revolutionary, even anar¬ 
chical, but its hidden causes spring from a divine 
discontent, as all but the prejudiced, the stag¬ 
nant and the selfish must perceive. Men are 
crying out for a new statement of values, the old 
ones having long since proved themselves false 
and illusory. Everywhere in the world human¬ 
ity is trying to find an outlet for that spiritual 
emancipation by which it hopes to found a new 
and better ordering of human life. In music, in 
art, in literature, there is direct evidence that the 
human “ soul ” is breaking through the fetters 
of those dead-and-gone traditions which for too 
long have encompassed it — those traditions 
which long since have outlived their period of 
usefulness. 


63 


SOME CONFESSIONS 


The Dullness of “ Doing it Now 99 

f KNOW a man. He is a worthy man, of little 
imagination, and less human sympathy. But 
he is all I should like to be, yet I am much hap¬ 
pier by being different. His life is as clockwork 
in its regularity. If his spirit wavers, he reads 
texts — then on he goes renewed in valiantness 
and, let us hope, rejoicing. In his bedroom, 
immediately facing him, so that the first thing 
his opening eyes rest upon may inspire the mind 
which lies behind them, he has hung the adage: 
“ Do it Now.” It is printed in big scarlet 
letters on a white ground, and, as if that were 
not decorative enough, the artist has painted 
tiny bunches of primroses in each corner — most 
inappropriate, it seems to me, since the “ prim¬ 
rose path ” generally runs in the opposite direc¬ 
tion to practical advice. But he really and truly 
does try to live up to it, which is more than the 
usual moral adage can hope for. For example, 
it makes him spring out of bed the moment his 
alarm clock goes off. It follows him to the 
breakfast table, where it makes him eat his meal 
64 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 

without first glancing through the morning news¬ 
paper to see if yet another husband has been 
accused of poisoning his wife. (Wives do not 
seem to be very popular at the moment, do 
they?) It prevents him from having a “first 
pipe ” after his breakfast is ended. It makes him 
catch his train every morning without having to 
run for it. It keeps him at business long after 
his fellow-workers have seized their hats and 
departed homewards, or so we hope! It sends 
him to bed every night at half-past ten, except 
on Saturday, when he “ frisks ” until eleven. In 
fact, it is worth about a thousand a year to him. 
But what a life! 

I, too, have my own pet adage, though I do 
not hang it opposite my bed, for the simple rea¬ 
son that I find a greater spiritual comfort in a 
cup of tea. I, too, follow it implicitly, except 
when a qualm of conscience sends me fleeing 
along the Right Road for just about ten minutes. 
It is this: “ If it’s nice, do it now. If it’s not, do 
it to-morrow: who knows but you may die 
to-day!” What a sybaritic philosophy, you 
declare, in that “ shocked manner ” which a 
clergyman’s wife feels she must assume when 
she hears “damn!” It is. All my friends con¬ 
demn it. And so do I. It costs me, roughly 
65 


SOME CONFESSIONS 


speaking, five hundred a year. But I do enjoy 
myself, thank you very much! 

I wonder why all the nasty things have to be 
done now, while you are held up as an “ horful ” 
example if you put off doing the nice things 
until to-morrow? Experience has taught me 
that one renunciation inevitably leads to an¬ 
other, until at last the only definite possessions 
your life contains are the things you have volun¬ 
tarily gone without. Always to do the thing you 
should do at the very moment when you should 
do them, seems to lead people at last towards 
a kind of emotional atrophy; at least, I must 
judge so from my knowledge of the few I know 
who, applying Duty relentlessly to the minor 
details of the Everyday, see all life at last, not 
as one Big Purpose, but as a thousand-and-one 
“ important ” insignificances beyond which their 
vision grows dim. I speak in metaphor, of 
course, when I complain that there are far too 
many people who, when you impulsively suggest 
to them a visit to a theatre on Thursday after¬ 
noon, assure you that nothing would please them 
more, only “ they always pour out dear John’s 

tea for him on that day, otherwise-” At 

last, the self-invited tyranny of trivial duties 
becomes the one main factor in their lives. 

66 



OF AN AVERAGE MAN 


Never to do the “ wrong thing ” occasionally 
usually ends by doing the “ right thing ” in the 
wrong way. 

And yet, how many people there are who plan 
out their lives as if life were a jig-saw puzzle, 
each daily duty forced to dovetail into the next 
day’s efforts. Like a jig-saw puzzle, too, their 
lives make a very well-coloured picture. But 
then, the most uninteresting moment of a jig-saw 
puzzle comes immediately you have discovered 
the proper resting-place of the very last piece. 
True, you are faced by a complete design, but 
the result doesn’t seem at all commensurate with 
the labour you went through in making it. The 
“ fun ” of a jig-saw puzzle lies in trying to do 
it, the bits which we think are going to fit into 
other bits, and don’t: the joy of at last finding 
two pieces which really belong to one another, 
over which there is more rejoicing far, than when 
the whole thing is completed. And it seems to 
me, that this, too, is half the thrill of life. To 
do what you shouldn’t do occasionally makes 
the moment when you have done what you 
ought to do seem so wonderful. But “ Do it 
now ” always refers to the things you should do 
but don’t want to, and in those who follow the 
adage relentlessly — well, haven’t you noticed 
67 


SOME CONFESSIONS 


that their hearts hold no particle of joy, either 
for themselves or for others? It is their “ re¬ 
ward it is also their punishment. 


68 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 


Old Friends for New 

T^ULLY conscious that I may incur the dis- 
* pleasure of all those for whom the trite 
remark is on all occasions the most apt — I must 
confess that a New Friendship is a very delight¬ 
ful experience. “ New brooms always sweep 
the cleanest,” I hear Old Friends remark, since 
Old Friends always seem to grudge us our latest 
fancies. They say it in a disparaging sense, 
though why they do so I can never understand 
— the remark seems such a splendid advocacy 
for new brooms! Anyway, New Friends are like 
new brooms in this respect — they do seem to 
sweep away a whole heap of accumulated bore¬ 
dom. Old Friends are at all times the more 
precious, but their society, though restful, is 
never thrilling exactly. They fit in as it were, 
with our bedroom moods. But one doesn’t 
always want to sit up in one’s bedroom; one 
flees there to be at rest, as a refuge from the 
madding throng. That, however, is not written 
in disparagement of bedrooms, nor of Old 
Friends. On the contrary, I would, personally, 
69 


SOME CONFESSIONS 

far rather keep the solitude of my bedroom 
intact and “ let ” my drawing-room, than share 
my bedroom with another and turn my drawing¬ 
room into my own private study. But — and I 
still write metaphorically — one does not dress 
up, put on one’s jewellery, polish up one’s wit, 
and generally deck oneself out to create a fine 
impression, merely to sit in one’s bedroom, or to 
entertain those whom long familiarity has given 
the key to our innermost sanctum. Upstairs we 
discard our outer glory, put on a dressing-gown 
and find peace. And if we must share these 
blessed moments of respite, we share them with 
Old Friends. They form part and parcel of our 
reposeful mood. All the same, the keen delight 
of repose soon palls — unless, of course, one hap¬ 
pens to be extremely old, or extremely “edgy.” 
We want, sooner or later, to descend in our full 
gala attire, prepared to “ sparkle ” before an 
audience. But we don’t see our Old Friends 
among this audience. We keep them for those 
moments when merely to get away from the 
crowd is at once a holiday, a respite and a refuge. 
They are precious — these Old Friends of ours 
— but they don’t make the blood course faster 
through the veins; they don’t re-animate the 
bored and vacant mind; they don’t, as it were, 
70 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 


provide the “ champagne ” of existence,— 
except occasionally and in a purely material 
sense during those gaily-sad festivities known as 
“ anniversaries ” — so beloved by Old Friends. 
They are as a long drink of good old-fashioned 
tea after a surfeiting of those more sparkling 
beverages which may cheer, but can always be 
relied upon to inebriate. One seeks out one’s 
Old Friends when one is tired, or in trouble; 
when one has become sick of mere pretence, 
bored by the effort to hold up our most ingratiat¬ 
ing mask before the world; weary of pretending 
to be younger than we are, or happier than we 
make believe. We look upon them rather as we 
look upon God—thankful from the bottom of 
our heart that they are there, but not particu¬ 
larly thrilled thereby unless our vitality is at a 
low ebb, or when we need encouragement and 
additional hope, comfort, and some assuagement 
from the pin-pricks of the trivial. Old Friends 
are as an ever-blessed refuge in times of 
trouble; they are, as it were, the members of 
that home-circle we make for ourselves through 
life; but they do not thrill us as the promise of 
novelty thrills us; they do not encourage us to 
be what we yearn to be, so much as soothe the 
bitter realization of our own shortcomings. 
71 


SOME CONFESSIONS 


They belong to our fireside moods; but we do 
not want to sit by the fireside all the time — 
there are too many periods in life when there is 
nothing left for us to do, when we must perforce 
sit quietly in some restful backwater, watching 
not unhappily, those of more youthful vigour 
pass us by. 

True, there are times when Old Friends seem 
less preferable than absolute strangers. The 
moments, for example, when they show you 
scant sympathy in your “ very latest rave.” Old 
Friends never seem able to understand our new¬ 
born passions. “ Speedy friendships,” they in¬ 
form us covertly, “ soon run themselves out of 
breath!” We hate them for the very probable 
truth underlying that remark. But then a 
“ rave ” always looks like a permanent passion, 
until we have known it so intimately that we 
have ceased to rave about it. Not that our 
disappointment outweighs the delight of our 
past desires to sympathize with the one which 
now fills our hearts. That is why we so often 
turn temporarily towards New Friends to find in 
their ignorance of our failures a very desirable 
consolation. Old Friends do not flatter us, they 
know us for the fallible human beings that we 
are. But a little flattery, especially when we are 
72 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 

uncertain of ourselves and of our own motives, is 
sometimes as valuable as downright plain speak¬ 
ing. New Friends will always judge us by our 
best side, because they are unacquainted with 
our worst. That is why we shine so much more 
brilliantly in their company. And in shining 
thus brilliantly we return home immensely 
pleased with ourselves. We believe that we have 
been appreciated; we feel that at last we have 
been understood. Our New Friends fill us with 
great enthusiasm. We believe that we have 
found “ the ideal companion ” at last. We 
haven’t really, of course; but we have found a 
new audience—and a new audience can often be 
mistaken for the finest companion in the world. 

Yet, there comes to us, sooner or later, a mood 
when we don’t want an audience of any kind; 
when we yearn for the curtain to fall, hiding us 
from the sight of the multitude, however appre¬ 
ciative they may be of our merits. They are 
the moods when we just want to slink away out 
of sight, and be simple and natural; to be just 
what we are — owning it in all humility. Then 
it is that we seek the society of Old Friends and 
turn to God. And our Old Friends, because 
they are our old friends, will be there to welcome 
us. We shall not regard each other as excep- 
73 


SOME CONFESSIONS 

tional characters to be admired and over-praised, 
but the memory of old associations will knit us 
together in an unbreakable tie. There is no 
link so binding as the link of remembrance. 
Yesterday we may, perhaps, have sought happi¬ 
ness each in a different way; but the memory of 
the day-before-yesterday, and the day before 
that, will bring us together To-day and, side by 
side, we shall bravely face the unknown To¬ 
morrow. As we enter the gathering obscurity of 
old age we shall enter it hand in hand. Together 
we shall be able to live over again our lives in 
retrospect, recollecting its happy moments, 
laughing over its past humours, and forgetting 
all those things which are painful to remember. 
We shall not need to hide anything, since most 
things are already known, and age and experi¬ 
ence have made us understand each other’s fail¬ 
ings. New Friends are, as it were, the tentative 
“ feelers ” which the lonely heart sends out in its 
search for the Perfect Friend. But rarely these 
feelers secure anything more permanent than a 
passing exchange of confidence, followed by 
growing estrangement and a bored “ Good-bye.” 
They quickened the senses for a while; they 
added alertness to the mind. But they pass — 
like ships in the night. Happily, those Old 
74 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 

Friends, who never stirred our imagination, who 
only shared, as it were, the most prosaic mo¬ 
ments of our lives, remain behind to bring us 
comfort at long last. For the mind grows stale 
at length, bored and weary of its search for the 
romantic unattainable. But the heart, as it 
grows older, turns more and more towards those 
who have shared with it the experience of long 
ago. It is satisfied by a very undemonstrative 
affection at last — none the less steadfast, how¬ 
ever, because it is undemonstrative. It is content 
to be loved — especially to be loved. And our 
Old Friends love us in spite of what we are, in 
spite of what we have been. They are a part of 
our lives, as we are part of theirs. We rely upon 
each other when the shadows lengthen and life 
has become as a story which is already told. 
Without this Old Friendship — so disillusioned, 
yet still so strong— we should be stranded 
indeed. It may only be a very prosaic affection 
to outward view, but its roots are founded on 
ineradicable memories of the years that are 
dead. And, after all, even life itself is for the 
most part a prose narrative, isn’t it? It is only 
very occasionally that we hear a few notes of 
that “ melody ” — that song of might-have-been 
which haunts the inner silence of our “ souls.” 
75 


SOME CONFESSIONS 


The Right to be Loved 

QO many people put in a claim for affection, 
^ as if it belonged to them as a right — like 
the air they breathe. Because they are parents; 
because they are children; because they are 
married; because they happen to live next door 
— they expect to be loved without effort and 
without question. But affection is a very 
ephemeral possession. Love is only a reflection 
of ourselves. If we give none, then none is ever 
returned to us. And to be loved is something 
very much more than, metaphorically, to sit on a 
sofa and look pretty. Of course, you may get a 
certain kind of attention even if that is all the 
effort you make to obtain it; the kind of atten¬ 
tion which the pantry boy gives to the new 
kitchenmaid after he has discovered that she 
powders her nose. But the love which is really 
worth having is the reward of something so much 
more personal than a becoming blouse and silk- 
stockinged legs as far as anyone can see! It is a 
perpetual effort, a never-ending proof of lovable- 
76 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 

ness. You can no more expect to be loved with¬ 
out an effort than you can hope to escape the 
income tax authorities by changing your 
address. The people who cry aloud that they 
are “ lonely ” are, for the most part, the people 
who are terrified at being alone. The really 
lonely people seldom “ make a song ” of their 
loneliness; they just show it by trying to make 
other people less lonely. I sometimes think that 
the reason why churches are generally so full of 
of women is not entirely because women are 
more emotionally inclined, more mystical, more 
in touch, as it were, with the angels than men, 
but simply because women, as a rule, are much 
lonelier individually. They have not the oppor¬ 
tunity for indulgence in those fleeting joys which 
can get a man through a lonely time more suc¬ 
cessfully than drugs, and are more tangible in 
their immediate satisfaction than listening to a 
sermon. When a man’s work is done, that man is 
to all intents and purposes jree. A woman is 
very rarely free. When she has thrown aside the 
chains of work, supposing she does work, she is 
still bound by the chains of convention. She can 
only enjoy herself under sanctified chaperonage. 
It is her misfortune that her minor indiscretions 
are forgiven her by the world with as much diffi- 
77 


SOME CONFESSIONS 


culty as her major sins; and for this she must 
blame other women. 

I am, of course, not referring to sexual love 
when I say that we get from the world just as 
much affection as we give it. We may not 
always get it from the people to whom we give 
our devotion, but it returns to us from other 
directions; so that what we lose on the swings 
we certainly make up for on the roundabouts. 
Yet this fact few people seem able to realize. In 
love, they always want, as it were, to put in 
sixpence and draw six pennies out, if they can’t 
extract a shilling. Their expectation is human, 
I suppose, but it is very seldom realized. The 
whole art of love is to know when to subdue its 
proofs. You can quite easily prove your affection 
too often and exhibit it too long. Love is a pas¬ 
sion, but no passion really demands a cooler 
judgment. It is just as true to say that love 
inspires love as to say that love can also kill it. 
We are, even the oldest of us, but children, and, 
although we may cry out for sweets, if we are 
allowed the run of a sweet shop, our liberty in¬ 
variably makes us sick. What we have in abun¬ 
dance we very soon take for granted, and this 
applies to love as well as to possessions. The 
boundary line between being an idol and a door- 
78 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 


mat is very easily passed. And though an idol 
may quite easily become a door-mat, who ever 
heard of a door-mat being resuscitated as an 
idol? That is why most of the men and women 
who cry aloud that they are lonely and misunder¬ 
stood are generally those who loved too little or 
loved too long. The only difference between 
them is that one obtains scant sympathy and the 
other too much pity. But for both of them life 
leads straight across a bleak and lonely desert. 
For, say what you will in praise of work and 
money, influence, power, and social position, the 
only thing which really counts in the long run is 
the love we give to others, and the love which 
others give to us. We are all lonely wanderers 
through life, and love only can cheat us into the 
illusion that we are not absolutely alone. 

And yet, how literally furious some people are 
when they discover that their world does not 
appreciate them to the extent which they believe 
they deserve! They may have shown that world 
nothing but tyranny, bad temper, envy, hatred, 
and malice, but the moment they demand proofs 
of affection and do not get them, they cry out 
about the ingratitude of men, their utter selfish¬ 
ness, the stupidity of being anything but selfish 
79 


SOME CONFESSIONS 

when all unselfishness receives is a turned back 
just when open arms would be the only thing to 
make life worth living. There are some people 
who are kind in a way which makes you desire to 
hurl a brickbat at them instead of showing grati¬ 
tude. These are generally the people who are 
most cynical concerning the ingratitude of man. 
We are entertained lavishly by certain folk; but 
do we feel grateful to them? — do we need to 
feel gratitude? Certainly not! They have enter¬ 
tained us not from any altruistic motives, but 
simply because we helped somewhat to make 
their entertainments a success. There has been 
no sacrifice on either side. And kindness without 
a certain sacrifice is something which it is only 
reasonable to forget the next day. For without 
a certain sacrifice we never find real affection or 
love. The man who by some small act of unsel¬ 
fishness on his part has added a little to our hap¬ 
piness is dearer to us than all those people who 
have bombarded us with invitations or, to de¬ 
scend again to metaphor, given us out of their 
abundance a mother-o’-pearl collar stud on our 
birthday. And, thank God, love and affection 
are the two great gifts which no money can buy. 
Some people try to buy them, and are bitterly 
disappointed when, in sending in their account, 
80 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 


they find they are only faced with a bad debt. 
For love has no money equivalent. It is the 
only thing which is cheap as well as rare. 


81 


SOME CONFESSIONS 


On Getting Back Home Again 

/""vNE of the great benefits of a holiday is that 
it makes you appreciate your own home 
when you get back to it. It is very nice to “ get 
away,” but it is equally nice to get back again. 
One’s own little corner of this great big world 
— well, it may indeed be only a “ corner ” but 
all the same it’s the happiest place this side of 
the Great Divide, isn’t it? And it is the happiest 
place . . . well, simply because it is our very 
own, and we can live therein more peacefully 
than in all the gilded palaces we yearn after 
theoretically, only to become so quickly bored 
by them, once we find ourselves shut within their 
portals. Everything seems friendly to us in our 
own little home. The sofa may be stuffed with 
horsehair, but at least we know the worst it can 
offer: we are under no delusion regarding the 
discomfort which underlies its chintz magnifi¬ 
cence. And it seems to know us, too, and is 
pleasantly familiar, as is the way of familiar 
things. Then our bedroom, that blessed sanctu¬ 
ary of the lonely, how we really love it in com- 
82 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 

parison with the one we have just vacated and, 
probably, had to pay so much to sleep in. In our 
homes we know where everything is, and, strange 
though it may read, everything seems to know 
where we are, too, and to love iis for being there! 
We and our belongings are part and parcel of one 
whole, and that “ whole ” is what we call our 
“ home.” It is a place where we pretend no 
longer; a place where we can cast away the mask 
we are forced to wear in the world; a place 
wherein we can close our eyes, and live at peace. 
Of course we pretend to dislike it, as we always 
pretend to dislike over-familiar things and peo¬ 
ple; but once separated from it, or them, for a 
long while, and how a return seems to be like a 
return to harbour after many days spent on a 
strange sea. So, as I wrote just now, to get away 
from “ home ” is necessary every so often, just 
to make the return thereto a welcome moment of 
satisfaction. It is very nice to be able to “spread 
your wings ” from time to time, but to be able 
to “ spread yourself ” is just as essential. And 
the only place wherein you can really “ spread 
yourself ” is that little place — may be of four 
walls only — which is yours to do what you like 
with,— that sanctuary which is to you the one 
small space in all the big lonely world on which 
83 


SOME CONFESSIONS 


you can plant your feet firmly, proudly, and be, 
if only for your own edification, the one great 
big “ I AM!” 

All the same, I think that a real “ home ” is 
the creation of middle-age. A young person’s 
“ home ” lacks that atmosphere of homeliness 
which is far more essential than exquisite furni¬ 
ture and fine hangings, and emanates exclusively 
from the owner. A young person’s “ home ” 
is often pretty, but it rarely seems at the same 
time that “ haven ” which is but another word 
for home. Young people have not so much 
need of a refuge as those farther advanced along 
the road of life. Young people use their homes 
as a kind of “ springing-off ” centre, or as a back¬ 
ground to their own newly-acquired importance. 
But middle-aged people don’t want to spring-off 
anywhere; on the contrary, they want to hide 
themselves in some security; they yearn to have 
a backwater where they can anchor and be at 
rest, away from the fast-flowing stream of the 
outside world. And somehow or other this sat¬ 
isfied yearning creates the atmosphere of their 
homes. The welcome is warm, like the firelight 
streaming through the open door of a friend’s 
house at the end of a long journey along a lonely 
road. Something of a respite from life’s battle 
84 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 


seems to radiate from a real home, so that one 
has therein a feeling of security, of restfulness, 
of peace, an anchorage to which one can attach 
one’s own storm-damaged bark. And, strangely 
enough, the poorer the household the richer it 
often is in this atmosphere of “ home.” Servants 
are home-breakers, in more senses than one. An 
easy chair, a warm fire, and a welcome, even if 
it be only the welcome of one’s dog, surely a 
“ home ” is there! And though the world out¬ 
side may offer us many joys, much change, ad¬ 
venture, passion and delight, one comes back 
thankful at last and at length, to that metaphori¬ 
cal easy chair, that warm fire, and that welcome 
which, whether in a cottage or a palace, is what 
we mean when we think of “ home.” 


85 


SOME CONFESSIONS 


The Sex-Chains of Women 

A MAN’S ambition is, as a rule, to make a 
fortune; a woman’s ambition — whatever 
camouflage she may set up to hide the longing 
of her heart — is to find the man. Very, very 
rarely is a man turned aside from his pursuit of 
success by love, whereas a woman carries within 
her heart a desire for love, which may at any 
moment change the whole tenor of her career. 
Because of this, women will be forever handi¬ 
capped in their fight for an independent place in 
the world’s affairs. A man is quite satisfied if 
he be loved. To be loved leaves him free to 
continue carving out his niche in the hall of 
fame. But to love — ah! that may swamp 
every desire to achieve either fame or fortune. 
And few women can live in contentment by be¬ 
ing loved merely. They must at all times love, 
give of their heart and soul and body, before 
they feel that life has given them their greatest 
happiness, casting for them a glamour over the 
commonplace round of the everyday. Love to a 
man is a kind of “ extra,” and if he cannot obtain 
86 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 

the real thing, then a counterfeit makes quite a 
pleasant diversion. But in love, women can 
never be contented with the spurious article. 
Only on the bed-rock of a Steadfast Adoration 
do they feel strong enough and brave enough to 
face the world and the long years which stretch 
out before them towards old age. In following 
her career love is either a woman’s greatest 
enemy or her best friend. She lives forever 
exposed to the risk of having the temple made by 
her hands shattered at one blow merely by the 
insatiable longings of her heart to give of its love 
unceasingly. A man so often judges his life’s 
success by his banking account. But the 
banking account of a woman plays only a very 
subsidiary part in her inner satisfaction. If she 
has found love — then all else may be taken 
from her; she may still rise triumphantly over 
those who pity her for her failure in the world’s 
race. True, for a time she may believe, and 
make others believe, that in financial freedom 
she has found her heart’s desire. But sooner or 
later she has to acknowledge that financial free¬ 
dom has in no way realized her “ dreams.” True, 
while she is young, she may be satisfied by ad¬ 
miration and that physical passion which poets 
disguise so beautifully as “love.” But there 
87 


SOME CONFESSIONS 


comes a time when to be loved will not satisfy 
her. She must herself love — or sink into that 
state of disgruntled loneliness which is the un¬ 
acknowledged bogey haunting every woman’s 
inner life. 

Men can live so much more independently of 
love than women. Therein lies their strength. 
Therein is the power given them to carve out 
their career undisturbed. But a woman always 
sees her career threatened by love, and her heart 
is so constituted that she cannot work for herself 
independently and love at the selfsame time. 
So her career usually “ goes to the wall,” and the 
end of her life, if it be a happy end, finds most of 
her labour wasted — or perhaps I should not 
write “ wasted ” so much as renounced glori¬ 
ously. So it would seem, indeed, that no woman 
can ever know more than a semblance of real 
freedom. She may entertain her men friends at 
her own private flat — and that seems to spell 
“ independence ” for most women! —she may 
meet men on what she likes to call an equal foot¬ 
ing (though there is really no such thing in the 
association of the sexes as equality!); she may 
discuss matters which she would scarcely talk 
over even with other women, and smoke, and 
gamble, and swear; but she is never really free 
88 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 


all the same. No one can ever be free whose real 
happiness comes only through the desire to love 
and be loved. Worldly success is surely a tri¬ 
umph of supreme egotism; whereas love, at its 
finest, is a complete negation of the ego, a desire 
to serve the loved one in all particulars and at all 
points, the glorious triumph of unselfishness, in 
which all personal ambitions must, perforce, play 
a minor role. That is why, among all the women 
who seek to carve out a career for themselves, so 
few there are whose career outlives their youth! 
They end either as happy mothers, or happy 
wives, or happy mistresses — or, maybe, most 
unhappy “ bachelor ” middle-aged “ kittens.” 

So, though love be to the heart a state of slav¬ 
ery, it is in nearly every instance women’s most 
happy freedom. Outside love — they are the 
veriest slaves, dependent on a thousand customs, 
conventions, traditions, instincts, from which 
they cannot cut themselves adrift to find happi¬ 
ness in that bondless existence so easily to be 
enjoyed by men. What a man may do may be 
forgiven him within a year. Other men don’t 
particularly care, and women can find the means 
to forget, providing he can offer them compensa¬ 
tions in the way of looks, or cleverness, or 
money, or wit, or admiration of themselves. But 
89 


SOME CONFESSIONS 


what a woman does is remembered against her so 
long as ever she may live. She, too, may be 
beautiful and intelligent, possess wealth and wit 
and charm, but other women not only do not for¬ 
give her her past trespasses because of these 
gifts, but they remember because of them. So 
a woman realizes that in the life she leads oppo¬ 
site the world, there is no such thing for her as 
“ going back and beginning all over again.” Only 
in love can she find some one for whom her 
“ past ” is as if it had never been. But the world 
she knows judges her future by that past, and if 
there is much she would like to forget in the long 
ago, the society in which she moves will never 
allow her to forget it. Thus, even in what she 
likes to believe is her newly-attained liberty, 
that freedom is more illusory than real. She may 
live what she likes to refer to as “ her own life,” 
but usually her struggle to live it is not so severe 
as the struggle she goes through to prevent all 
the details of that life being found out. Mostly a 
husband must come to her rescue in the end. 
There is a great “ hushing up,” and no one is 
more utterly thankful if that “ hushing up ” be 
successful than the heroine of the affair. I shall 
believe in the real freedom of women when they 
can live freely without perpetual camouflage and 
90 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 


pretence, and wholly and solely within them¬ 
selves, independently of what the world thinks 
of them — following the dictates of their own 
heart and moral convictions to the end, whether 
that long last be bitter or sweet, or merely 
“ flat ” — as are so many last chapters in life. 


91 


SOME CONFESSIONS 


Ever-recurrent Doubt 

HHHERE comes, I believe, to each one of us, 
A though many of us own it not, the recurrent 
moment when we ask ourselves if the life which 
we are living be the life that is best “ worth 
while if our ambition be worthy of the efforts 
we make to attain it; if, after all, it matters 
what we do, so long as we are happy — 

The worldly hope men set their hearts upon 
Turns ashes — or it prospers, and anon, 

Like snow upon the desert’s dusty face 
Lighting a little hour or two — is gone. 

In these moments we envy the ignorant man 
who can live from day to day with no heed for 
the morrow and its many problems. We yearn 
to change places with him. Like him, we want 
to be able to accept, in blind faith, the lot to 
which we have been called; and, like him, stead¬ 
fastly believe that all is well with the life here¬ 
after. In a hundred years, we ask ourselves, 
what will it matter — what, indeed, will anything 
matter to those who are now living upon this 
earth? There comes to us at the same time the 
92 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 


sudden realization that even the mummies in the 
museum, though it is so hard to believe it, were 
once men or women as full of life as we are; 
filled with the selfsame ambitions; haunted by 
the same doubts; living, as so many of us live, as 
if life were eternal, and that each conscious 
moment were not a space of time so precious 
that to waste it in trivial endeavour is to waste 
something as valuable as our life’s blood! It is 
not pleasant, this recurrently haunting thought 
that what we are, that what we do, will in so 
short a space be as completely obliterated as if 
we and ours were but the figments of a dream 
forgotten long ago. It is so hard to realize this, 
we who are so full of our own small importance, 
who are so thrilled by the happenings of our little 
world and the part we are called upon to play in 
them. It is only occasionally that, as it were, the 
veil of the present is lifted, and our imagination 
explores the long future, to realize that, there, 
mein shall look in vain for the well-known foot¬ 
prints which now seem to make so deep an im¬ 
pression on the sands of time. 

And when you come to think of it, how much 
of this precious time we waste in trying to 
grasp that “ little more ” which experience shows 
us only too frequently does not bring us any 
93 


SOME CONFESSIONS 

kind of satisfaction commensurate with the pains 
we take to obtain it. So many of us resemble an 
aunt of mine, who, fortunate enough to enjoy an 
unearned income of fifteen hundred a year, gaily 
spent two thousand, and then, when her income 
had dwindled to a net thousand pounds per 
annum, went through a rigid form of what she 
called economy, and only spent twelve hundred; 
till at last she had to find satisfaction somehow 
on an income considerably less than those wages 
she had at one time paid her cook. After all, 
when you really and truly come to consider it, 
happiness — real happiness — is not such a 
costly affair after all. It is only what we mis¬ 
take for happiness which runs away with both 
our income and our energy. But few people are 
ever satisfied by “ enough.” They are always 
striving after that “ little more ” which is the 
will-o'-the-wisp leading us to disaster in the bogs 
and marshland. Maybe the chief trouble is that 
very few people realize what constitutes their 
happiness. They take their happiness “ cue ” 
from their next-door neighbour, and often break 
themselves in an endeavour to reach his stand¬ 
ard. They suffer from that inherent desire in 
most men and women to be mistaken for a tin- 
pot king or queen, even if only in a very tin-pot 
94 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 


kingdom. Some will even go to the furthermost 
limits of sacrifice in order to obtain a semblance 
of a tin-pot majesty. They will pay a number of 
people to do for them the simplest duties, and 
yet wonder why their newly-acquired leisure 
offers them little else but long hours of boredom- 
which have to be filled in somehow. They will 
entertain lavishly a number of people whose 
only interest in them is what they can get for 
themselves out of the entertainment. Of course, 
for the time being, it makes the entertainers a 
centre of attraction, but what is the satisfaction 
of being “ the centre of attraction ” if you have 
to pay the supers a fee to stand around and 
applaud? No, the trouble is that most people 
are always trying to find happiness in things out¬ 
side, not only themselves, but their proper sphere 
in life; the result being that they never find it 
anywhere, and the fruitless search has to be paid 
for in disappointment and tears, just like every 
other fruitless search, which misses its goal. 

Say what you will, too much prosperity is 
worse for most of us than too much adversity. 
The “ little more/’ and how much it is; the 
“ lot more,” and how it usually carries us out of 
our depth into deep waters, where the “ best in 
us ” drowns ignominiously. It is far rarer to 
95 


SOME CONFESSIONS 

meet a man or a woman who have kept their 
head in good fortune than men and women who 
have lost heart in privation. Give a man the 
nearest approach to complete liberty possible in 
this world of comparative slavery — and what a 
“ hash ” he makes of it as a rule! Discipline is 
good for all of us. You know where you are 
under discipline, whereas individual irresponsi¬ 
bility demands that a man should make the most 
of his freedom — and few men know what to do 
with their liberty when they are given the oppor¬ 
tunity to do what they like with it. Modern edu¬ 
cation rarely helps to give a man resources 
within himself. When its object is not to lend 
him a kind of intellectual “ pretence/’ it is de¬ 
signed to give him the quickest means to get the 
better of his brother men. I always think that 
the ways in which most men and women pass 
their hours of leisure are the greatest condemna¬ 
tion of the good which modern education is sup¬ 
posed to confer on the educated. A worker, after 
all, has a right to do what he likes with his 
liberty. It is the life led by the majority of 
those who never work which is the worst criti¬ 
cism of their professed ideals. And yet, the ideal 
even of those who work is often merely to imi¬ 
tate, even in a small way, the poverty of 
96 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 


imagination which the leisured classes bring to 
their leisure. But nothing would seem to teach 
people wisdom in this respect — not even the 
knowledge that the leisured classes are by no 
means the happiest. If they have no worries, 
the majority of people will invent some — and 
groan louder than any. There is always some¬ 
thing out of everybody’s reach — and that 
“ something ” will often ruin contentment with 
things they already possess. It is this “ little 
more ” which leads most of us astray. For when 
we have obtained that “ little more ” there is 
always a “ little more ” to entice us after that. 
And so we waste our lives in a vain endeavour to 
reach the happy unattainable, while all the while 
we ignore that “ jolly good time ” we could have 
if we were brave enough to go our own way and 
enjoy the benefits which are already our posses¬ 
sion. But this is, of course, a “ trite ” remark. 
Nevertheless, it is so wise that you can’t teach 
it to anybody. They just have to learn it for 
themselves; which most of them do, too late! 


97 


SOME CONFESSIONS 


Small Efforts are the Most Difficult 

TT is strange how many of us will rise to a 
big occasion, while failing lamentably in 
those teeny-weeny ones which really make up 
the humdrum routine of the Everyday. It is 
comparatively easy to be heroic on occasion; so 
supremely difficult, apparently, to be merely 
pleasant. In death, disaster or disease, a dozen 
people will rush to succour you who, when no 
sacrifice is demanded of them, will seem deliber¬ 
ately to thwart that metaphorical ray of sun¬ 
shine which is trying to pierce the mud-coloured 
clouds surrounding your existence. A hundred 
hands will endeavour to extricate you from the 
mire of circumstance, whereas scarcely one will 
be outstretched to give you a helping hand on¬ 
ward when once you have reached dry land. 
Too many people seem to attain their own salva¬ 
tion on the misery of other people. It makes 
them feel heroic; it makes them feel “ reli¬ 
gious”; it makes them feel inclined to seize 
their left hand with their own right one and to 
shake it vigorously. Their acts sometimes pass 
98 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 


for sympathy; but they are often merely so 
many means toward a self-complaisant end. Of 
course the world is all the better for those 
“ means,” but it would be better still were that 
willingness to serve far more consistent. Philan¬ 
thropy is at all times a grateful sacrifice for the 
philanthropists; the difficulty is to reconcile the 
distaste of “ philanthropized ” with the grati¬ 
tude they feel they ought to show and hate being 
obliged to do so. 

As I wander through life I am continually 
struck by the fact that the average Englishman 
and woman of education keeps his and her polite¬ 
ness in a neat compartment docketed — “ for 
special occasions only.” So few people are 
what I will call humanly polite — that is, polite 
to every human being, simply because he is a 
human being and so more or less his own brother. 
They will have one code of manners for their 
equals; another for their “ inferiors ”; and yet 
another for their “ superiors.” They will, as it 
were, recollect the age of chivalry in the presence 
of a well-dressed pretty woman standing up in 
an omnibus, and join with those whose cry is 
“ Equality of the Sexes ” when she happens to 
be poor as well as plain. With them the “ unex¬ 
citing ” is always “ unnecessary,” to be treated 
99 



SOME CONFESSIONS 


with all the off-hand manner accorded to other 
unnecessary things. They seem so frightened 
of their own dignity, their own self-importance, 
their own inner-exclusiveness, that their Human 
Philosophy is apparently: “ Be rude to every 
man, until you have found out that it will pay 
to be polite to him.” It makes life very dull and 
unnecessarily unhappy so often. It would seem 
easier for most of us to win a decisive battle than 
take even the smallest personal interest in any¬ 
one outside our clan. 

Most people pass through life as if their smiles 
were of such value that to accord one is an 
honour; to withhold one, a rebuke. They expect 
perfect manners from other people, but think so 
little of their own. They will ponder hard before 
they give a “ kind word ” to others, while 
“ unkind words ” will be spoken without a mo¬ 
ment’s hesitation. They will, metaphorically 
speaking, smile condescendingly at Mrs. Smith’s 
efforts to beautify her backyard, while they will 
spend long hours tearing her private character to 
shreds. Perhaps, it may be that in beautifying 
her backyard, Mrs. Smith is creating a kind of 
subtle criticism of their own; whereas, her fall 
from moral grace is, as it were, a bouquet 
thrown at the probity of her neighbours. So 
100 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 


much unnecessary misery is caused in life by 
the unkindly interest of people in other peopled 
business, and the slight encouragement they 
give them in all those small matters of the 
Everyday where encouragement is most re¬ 
quired. Manners far more than class divide the 
world into separate warring sections. So many 
women will greet in all geniality their equals, 
who will deliberately ignore the existence of 
their own charwomen wearily standing in a 
queue. So many men will require an outward 
deference from their employees, who would con¬ 
sider it beneath their dignity, as an employer, to 
return them even the first rudiments of common 
politeness. Most of us are slave-drivers at heart 
— slave-drivers or sycophants. It has made 
human society a deadly, contemptible affair — 
as every affair is deadly and contemptible which 
is founded on snobbish values and administered 
according to the ideal of boors. 

Speaking personally, I delight far more in 
familiarity from people I am never likely to see 
again, than from those whom I know, to the cost 
of my peace of mind, I shall run across almost 
every day of my life. But most people keep 
their bad manners for those whom they are not 
likely to see again, and their good ones, only 
101 



SOME CONFESSIONS 


where they may create an enviable reputation 
among the neighbours. 

If only people were more pleasant to each 
other during the drab round and common task, 
life would be so much more agreeable, less a per¬ 
petual defensive fight against pin-pricks and 
that soft claw which conceals talons. I suppose 
the reason why men and women are so rarely 
polite consistently is because there is no glory 
in being merely amiable, they cannot bank their 
amiability against such a time when they fail 
completely to live up to their best. They find it 
so much easier to shut the door in their neigh¬ 
bour’s face than ease his loneliness by a kind 
word. True, there are a few people who really 
do seem glad that their fellow-passengers 
through life were born at all. But the majority 
seem to look upon such a fact more in the light 
of an irritating actuality. They regard their 
fellow-men from the point of view of the school¬ 
master, or the policeman, or a judge; too rarely 
as a fellow traveller groping, like they are, 
through a maze of puzzling intricacy. It would 
seem sometimes as if they looked for an apology 
from their fellow-men for being alive at all. At 
least, that is the manner in which they meet 
them in the daily intercourse of the daily round. 

102 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 


I wish that I could re-write some of the Ten 
Commandments, I would scrap so many of 
them. Most of them cannot be lived up to 
either in the letter or in the spirit. They are 
useless for all practical purposes. To my mind 
the motto of the Boy Scout, “ Do at least one 
act of kindness each day ” — is worth more than 
all the Ten put together. I have just received 
from a Spanish reader a little translation of a 
poem which all Spanish children are made to 
learn. It is a poor translation, commonplace 
in language and trite in idea. Yet it contains an 
injunction so easy to fulfil and so wise in its 
knowledge of a very human need — that most 
people will class it among Christmas card poetry, 
and exclaim “ How very 4 Ella Wheeler Wil¬ 
cox’!” It runs— 

If any little word of mine 

May make some life the brighter; 

If any little song of mine 

May make one heart the lighter; 

God help me speak that little word 
God help me sing that lay, 

So may some sad and lonely heart 
More bravely face each day. 

How utterly trite! I can hear the superior 
person cry. True. And so are all simple things 
and simple people. But often — how wise they 
are in their simplicity! 

103 


SOME CONFESSIONS 


The Adventure of Life 

VERY one should come “ up against it ” 
^ once in his life. Not for too long — that 
way bitterness lies — but long enough for him to 
realize the essentials of happiness, long enough 
to give him that insight into the pitfalls of 
human existence which only trouble can show. 
Most of us are parochial at heart. We make 
even life in London a kind of villeggiatura, dur¬ 
ing each day of which we follow a circumscribed 
route, doing much the same things, listening to 
much the same ideas, meeting much the same 
kind of people, until at last our lives are led 
well-nigh within a radius of five miles, punctu¬ 
ated perhaps by a few excursions into the outer 
world — with a preference for those which are, 
to all intents and purposes, an exact replica of 
the world we have left behind. The trouble with 
the Comfortable is that they learn so little from 
their comfort. They think it belongs to them — 
an inherent right. They are always the first to 
cry that “ Man is master of his fate,” and that 
“ This is the best of all possible worlds to live 
in.” Both lies! But when a man is “ up against 
it,” when pain and trouble meet him at every 
104 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 


turn, he begins to realize that he is not the 
master of his own destiny, but rather the play¬ 
thing of some ironic fortune. And this realiza¬ 
tion often teaches him understanding and humil¬ 
ity — the two most precious possessions in the 
growth of the “ soul.” One learns things of 
greater value when one serves than when one 
directs — though directors may decry that opin¬ 
ion. So I believe that each one of us should go 
through a period of that kind of serving which 
is only a polite name for “ slavery.” Unless we 
know something of the world from, as it were, 
the standpoint of the “ dregs,” we really know 
very little of the world whatever. And how little 
we understand life until we have a personal and 
intimate knowledge of many of its phases. And 
what is life but a wonderful adventure wherein 
anything may happen, and the world just one 
big labyrinth to explore? It is unwise to treat 
either life or the world with too great deference; 
it is doubly unwise to mistake our own tempo¬ 
rary tin-pot power and importance for something 
which merits eternal fame! One learns secrets 
of greater value in a forced humility than in all 
the praise and applause with which admirers 
may welcome our success. 

And yet, how few there are who are imbued 
105 


SOME CONFESSIONS 

by anything even approaching a love of adven¬ 
ture. Curiosity, outside the curiosity which is 
“ gossip,” is one of the very rarest virtues. 
When you speak to the majority of people of 
“ adventure ” just round the corner, they look 
sly, believing that you refer to some flaxen¬ 
haired barmaid. But every new phase of ex¬ 
istence is an “ adventure,” and to live for a while 
outside the sphere to which you are more accus¬ 
tomed, is as intellectually exciting as any game 
of derring-do. Where I have found heaps of 
people mildly interested in other men’s theories 
and ideas, I have scarcely come across one who 
was interested in men — as human beings and as 
psychological studies. To the adventure of kill¬ 
ing they thrill, but the adventure of living leaves 
them unresponsive and cold. The world arouses 
no curiosity in them at all. They like their own 
little “ niche,” and anything outside it seems to 
them to threaten their smug peace of mind, likely 
to prove a danger to their own dignity and self- 
importance. They will willingly explore a 
jungle, should opportunity occur, and glory in 
the fact that they may possibly shoot a tiger 
therein; but to mix with and to know those who 
live and die in the human jungle around them 
bores them; they neither want to know the den- 
106 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 


izens of that jungle, nor even to know of them. 
They are not interested in life outside their own 
existence and the existence of those related to 
them; they are not interested in men as men, but 
only as convenient social companions who must 
not disturb them by anything untoward — 
either intellectually or morally. 

It has always been my “ dream ” to meet 
some one thrilled by the adventure of life, and 
I have never once found him. I have found 
plenty who will go forth to judge, or merely to 
allay some more or less idle curiosity regarding 
their brother men; but I have never come across 
one who neither judged nor wanted to reform, 
one who wished merely to live on equal terms 
with all men, as a simple man among other 
simple men; one who wished to get at the heart 
of every type of man; one who thrilled at that 
adventure which is consciousness; one who was 
free both in spirit and in body; one to whom the 
world was just the stage on which is enacted a 
wonderful drama — a drama in which he is quite 
content to play a super’s part, knowing that a 
“ super,” because he is unimportant, generally 
manages to see most of the play. 

And because I have never yet come across 
such an individual, I own, in all humility, my 
107 


SOME CONFESSIONS 


life has been lived far too long and far too often 
within, as it were, the shadow of the parish 
pump. I am one of those who are only com¬ 
pletely natural when alone, and who in com¬ 
pany become self-conscious. And alas! the self- 
conscious never get to know men as they really 
are. I only lose my self-consciousness when I 
am alone with a really sympathetic companion 
— I mean, not one who metaphorically holds my 
hand, and, gazing into my eyes, murmurs to me 
that the world doesn’t appreciate me at my 
proper worth; I mean some one who can aid me 
to detach myself from my self-consciousness and 
follow my every mood, simply because he under¬ 
stands the worst and the best of me. Of course, 
I have now reached that age when self-conscious¬ 
ness becomes one of the minor offences. But I 
have outgrown it only now when its “ cure ” has 
become of no importance and slight benefit. 
Were I able to live my life over again, knowing 
what I know now, being what I am to-day! — 
but ah! how many there are who secretly utter 
the selfsame wish and just as ineffectually. We 
can only stand aside, helping others to live the 
kind of life which we consider the happiest and 
the most valuable for them, “ dreaming ” at the 
same time that, perhaps, in another existence, 
108 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 

we, too, may benefit from that education, which 
is surely the only raison d’etre of life. As it is, 
we can only envy those who know the life they 
want to live and live it, wondering at the same 
time if they ever realize the virtue of their 
philosophy, the value of their courage. And so, 
were I, on the spur of the moment, asked to 
name two people whose life seemed fullest of 
what they wanted, and who thus must have 
found not only wisdom, but also happiness, I 
should name “ Jack London ” and “ Gaby Des- 
lys.” A strange combination, you exclaim! I 
own it is. But why I envy these two is that, not 
only did they win success along those paths 
where their ambition led them, but they both 
died before misery could square its account with 
joy. They died in the late afternoon. Both 
possessed natures whose greatest tragedy would 
have been to endure the inevitable twilight of 
physical life; both dreaded that twilight, because 
to them, more than to most of us, it would have 
meant a long and painful “ fifth act ” to that 
life story of theirs which Fate had told very 
completely in three. And both escaped the 
greatest tragedy of all, which is decay and old 
age. The art of the successful life is to know 
when to retire — even when to die. 

109 


SOME CONFESSIONS 


The Wrong Way to Look at Work 

A CERTAIN kind of originality is very easy 
to acquire. You have only to do the un¬ 
suitable thing, and, if you escape the accusation 
of being eccentric, ten to one you will be called 
“ distinctly out of the common.” I know a 
woman who all her life has done the outrageous 
thing, but done it so gaily that the world became 
willing at last to overlook anything she might do, 
providing she always did the one thing she 
should not have done. And she always did. I 
will call her “ Mrs. Barchester.” Why? Because 
that does not happen to be her name. We call 
her the “ older Mrs. Barchester ” because there 
is a younger one, and to refer to her as “ Mrs. 
Barchester senior ” would, as it were, put her 
into stiff corsets and dress her up in black satin, 
bugles and jet. “ Older ” she may be, but 
“ senior ” — never! She has already had sev¬ 
eral “ childhoods,” and is now in her pre-ulti- 
mate one. To celebrate her sixty-fifth birthday 
she gave a dance. And not only did she give a 
dance, but she expected to dance at her own 
110 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 

dance, too, which is not the usual expectation of 
hostesses aged sixty-five. Moreover, she realized 
her desire, since every man who was her guest 
felt obliged to ask her. She, of course, knew 
they would have to. She thoroughly enjoyed 
herself. I think she danced every dance, and 
danced them all extremely well. She had always 
been a good dancer. The War alone was able to 
take away her dancing shoes, as it were. Gaiety 
was a young people’s affair during those tragic 
years, when so many of them had to die. 
Elderly ladies had a far greater personal success 
serving in canteens. Mrs. Barchester served in 
a canteen. She preferred that kind of War work 
to the one of hurling metaphorical bouquets out 
of windows at returned soldiers and making a 
box of woodbines go the longest way possible in 
a hospital ward. For once in a way, she did the 
one thing suitable to her age, with a consequence 
that most people forgot all about her and the 
rest didn’t care what she happened to be doing. 
But with the signing of the armistice, twenty 
years fell from her heart. She immediately 
took up her life where she had been obliged to 
leave it in 1914, and happily found it much as 
usual. At least, she made it much as usual, for 
the reason — as she herself expresses it — age 
111 


SOME CONFESSIONS 


has this thing in common with youth — it 
doesn’t care. The “ older Mrs. Barchester ” 
doesn’t care. She doesn’t care what people say 
about her, so long as they say something. And 
she has always managed to provide fuel for that 
kind of conversation. Now, at sixty-five, she 
dances as vigorously as she danced at twenty- 
one. Whom she dances with doesn’t matter 
now as it did then. She just shuts her eyes; 
and, so long as she is dancing, so long as the 
band is playing, her thoughts are far away in 
those late Victorian days when she was some¬ 
thing of a “ professional beauty.” So she lives 
her life over again, and is fairly happy on the 
whole. And some people throw mud at her 
efforts to preserve the spirit of youth; but most 
people throw flowers. She is doing the “ un¬ 
suitable thing,” and doing it with a gay heart, 
which, after all, is the only way to do it. Pangs 
of conscience ruin the complexion. 

But all this seems a very roundabout way of 
arriving at the point of my story, namely, that, 
if you view life at twenty as you should only 
do at sixty, people say, “How admirable! 
How earnest! Such a nice, steady young man! ” 
Whereas, if you view life at sixty through the 
vision of twenty-one, they are equally enthusi- 
112 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 


astic. Only if you’re young when you are 
young, and old when you really are past your 
prime, do people take you for granted and say 
nothing at all. They just accept you as they 
accept their easy chair, and, in parenthesis, 
miss you far less when you break down and 
are tenderly borne away behind horses or in a 
motor-hearse driven on the first speed. It is so 
fatally easy for the old-young to become nothing 
but old men, and the young-old to develop the 
giddiness of “ flappers ”! If only the serious 
young man could preserve his youth as well as 
his seriousness, and the giddy old “ sport ” 
temper his giddiness with some of the wisdom of 
old age, people whose hearts do not march 
abreast with their age would then be such a su¬ 
preme good fortune to know. But how is it 
done? Alas! I do not know. All I know is that 
it is as difficult for the young to mature broadly 
as it is for the old to grow older gracefully. Only 
commonplace people seem able to do the right 
thing just at the age when they ought to do it, 
and just in that unnoticeable manner in which 
it should, perhaps, be done. 

I sometimes think that old age was given 
us to make us work. Were we always young, 
how many of us would grind and endure? 

113 


SOME CONFESSIONS 


Rather, we should all be playing in the sun, 
love-making and merry-making, “ travelling in 
little things.” But old age without having a 
feather bed to lie upon is indeed on the hard, 
hard rocks. Unfortunately, feather beds are 
expensive luxuries, so, if you want to own one, 
you must have quite a lot of money; and to 
have quite a lot of money you must do <piite 
a lot of work. And there’s the rub. For the 
people lying on feather beds have a mild con¬ 
tempt for people who must perforce lie on hard 
mattresses, while those who have to sleep on 
the cold ground are never forgiven their past 
trespasses. The world regards success from the 
feather-bed point of view. Your bank balance, 
not your virtues, places you on the right-hand 
side of the throne, and carves the promise of a 
glorious resurrection on your tombstone. And 
perhaps it is better thus. For if we put godliness 
before a sound business training, we should still 
be painting our bodies with woad and entertain¬ 
ing our friends to stewed donkey’s knuckle-bone 
in the dining corner at the far end of our cave. 
And yet, it always seems to me that work, like 
music, must be born in one. Most of us perform 
a little on some kind of an instrument, but 
very few of us can really play. We pick out the 
114 




OF AN AVERAGE MAN 

“ pretty bits ” and leave the fireworks to those 
who like to master them; but only those who 
have mastered the difficulties associated with 
“ fireworks ” ever give a recital at the Steinway 
Hall. It is their reward. We others “ amuse 
our friends,” or hope we do. And so it is with 
work. Not many of us work more than we are 
obliged. Those who do, ride eventually in their 
Rolls-Royce cars and are treated to some of the 
deference accorded to gods by people who- are 
paid so much a year to do so. Were art the sum¬ 
mit of man’s ambitions, millionaires would be 
classed with plumbers, and placed on a lower 
plane than ballet-dancers and mat-makers in 
Berlin wool. As it is, money is placed on the 
topmost throne, and to it the arts come beg¬ 
ging. This does not make life exactly deco¬ 
rative, but it helps to keep men practical. After 
all, art has elevated man from the level of the 
animals, but work has given him all those com¬ 
forts his body loves. And most people manage 
to feel extremely “ elevated ” when they are 
comfortable. Money is, as it were, the symbol 
of the easy-chair, and it is human nature to pre¬ 
fer to live in a room with a Chesterfield couch, 
than one in which there is nothing to sit down 
upon and be at “ ease,” except that purely 
115 


SOME CONFESSIONS 


spiritual “ ease ” which belongs to a lovely pic¬ 
ture, a lovely view, or even a futurist wall-paper. 

I wonder why it is that most people, when 
they expatiate on the benefit of work, always 
make it sound as unattractive as virtue described 
in a Sunday School. Work really is an “ adven¬ 
ture,” with all the risk and the thrill, the dis¬ 
appointment, and occasionally the reward, of 
adventures in more commonly regarded “ roman¬ 
tic ” walks of life. To achieve anything whatso¬ 
ever, one must endure drudgery. That is the 
worst of it, or the best, whichever way you look 
at life. Nothing worth getting is to be got 
quickly. The blessings we achieve for our¬ 
selves are far more satisfactory than those we 
receive from on high. But drudgery is the one 
thing which few of us can triumph over. We 
thrill to the final glory, as it were, but we cannot 
force ourselves to plod towards it step by step. 
We can understand great music, but we cannot 
make great music ourselves. We lack the will- 
to-work. But do not blame us. Work is as 
much a gift of the gods as genius, though it is 
popularly supposed that anyone can acquire it. 
But they can’t. We may cultivate what faint 
ray of the divine spark we possess, but the most 
we ever accomplish is the most that the majority 
116 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 

of us ever achieve—that is, to do many little 
things and not one thing really well. And work, 
alas! is so often just another name for drudgery. 
Even its rewards seem to come too late too often. 
So most people do as little as they can, and live 
to fleece those who are enjoying the reward of 
their labours with rheumatism or other chronic 
complaints of middle age. But you can’t fleece 
the aristocrats of the arts, simply because there 
is as a rule nothing whatever to fleece. So youth 
for the most part goes heedless on its way, being 
told that it really is enjoying itself, simply be¬ 
cause it is young. But the only youth which is 
really and truly enjoyable is young middle age. 
And to be able to enjoy that youthfulness is 
the supreme reward of hard work. The “ com¬ 
fortable forties,” when they are “ comfortable,” 
are very comfortable indeed. Not in the mak¬ 
ing of more and still more money does a man find 
happiness. There is no happiness in money as a 
hoard. “ Call no man successful,” Lord Beaver- 
brook writes, “ until he has left business with 
enough money to live the kind of life that pleases 
him. The man who holds on beyond this limit is 
laying up trouble for himself and disappointment 
for others. Success in the financial world is the 
prerogative of young men. A man who has not 
117 


SOME CONFESSIONS 


succeeded in the field before middle age comes 
upon him will never succeed in the fundamental 
sense of the term. He will just go on from year 
to year, making rather more or rather less money 
by a toil to which only death or old age will 
put a term.” Not the making of money for 
the sake of merely being rich ought to be a man’s 
motto, but making it in order that one may 
live independently the kind of life which is 
nearest to the heart’s desire. And that, it seems 
to me, is a far greater encouragement to work 
hard than all those adages about working for the 
sake of work — a kind of bodily duty to the 
world which should go hand in hand with our 
spiritual duty to God — which most middle-aged 
successful men recite to youth, the while they 
throw out their portly stomachs with the un¬ 
spoken injunction to become “ even as we.” 

Work doesn’t become a “ romance ” until 
you are working on your own and for yourself. 
I would far sooner be the sole proprietor of a 
village store than the head clerk of a big depart¬ 
ment belonging to somebody else. I don’t 
believe that any man really enjoys his work 
until his work belongs to him alone. A “ profit,” 
however small, is far more thrilling than a big 
salary. And boys should be educated with this 
118 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 


ideal in view. It would inspire them far more 
than the picture of prosperity in a frock coat 
and the ability to put on a top-hat on a rainy 
day without the slightest financial qualm. If 
parents only realized this, there would not be so 
many young men about who, having been 
through Eton or Harrow, and later on the uni¬ 
versities, when all is over, are worth exactly 
eighteen shillings a week in the world of labour 
which they must enter to fight their way upward. 
In most cases, the higher education is only really 
valuable as a “ hobby,” and “ hobbies ” are the 
happiness of middle age. 


119 


SOME CONFESSIONS 


The Prose which so often Obscures the Poetry 

TN our dreams we are all too apt to forget 

* those unromantic details of which they must 
eventually be composed if ever they are to be 
realized. We thrill to the glory of fulfilment, 
while turning a convenient blind eye towards 
those inglorious victories and defeats which we 
must go through before the ultimate glory can be 
realized. And sometimes we are so discouraged 
by these defeats, so little elated by these vic¬ 
tories, that we turn aside from our main purpose 
and spend the rest of life wondering cynically 
why things at close hand always appear so tame, 
whereas they seemed so wonderful when viewed 
from a distance. To give but one instance. We 
visit a friend in his house, and are entranced by 
the comfort and beauty and orderliness of every¬ 
thing that is his. If only we too had such a home, 
how supremely happy we should be! We 
forget that such beauty, such comfort, such 
orderliness, were only arrived at after long peri¬ 
ods of tiresome attention to detail; that each is 
only kept perfect by much sacrifice, hard work, 
120 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 


and a close attention to the dullest and most 
prosaic facts. But most of us don’t consider 
such things. We only see the result, and look 
at it under the impression that it has been 
arrived at suddenly, as by a miracle; and that it 
will retain its enviable qualities by virtue of cir¬ 
cumstances equally miraculous. The Way to 
Paradise has to be laid down, weeded and other¬ 
wise kept in order — though, as we regard that 
road from a distance, we usually fail to realize 
that we ourselves will have to do all the hard 
work. I always feel inclined to ask, when I listen 
to people telling me exactly what the After-Life 
is going to be, because they have been given a 
full description of it by some communicative 
spirit on the Other Side: Who does the washing 
up? Who lays down the drains? Who empties 
the dustbin? And if those who must perforce 
do these things, find the Other Life quite such 
an eternally “ good time ” as those who describe 
it to me are never tired of declaring that they 
do? The old-fashioned picture of a Heaven 
full of singing angels playing harps was less 
fraught with such awkward, but very necessary, 
leading questions. For, to speak in metaphor, 
you can’t cheer up a dying golfer with the prom¬ 
ise that life after death will be so like life before 
121 


SOME CONFESSIONS 


it that he can pass over in the hope that he may 
yet reduce his handicap, without also depressing 
the dying caddie and expiring greenkeeper with 
the fact that he may still be required to carry 
clubs and use a mowing-machine and lawn-roller. 

But not only in our hope of a jolly future 
life do we instinctively ignore the unpleasant, 
while “ visioning ” its ultimate beatitude. As 
we look toward the future and dream of the 
day when all our ambitions will be gratified, we 
overlook the commonplace, and often sordid, 
details which must still make up the foundation 
of that long-last haven in which we shall find 
— or think we shall — most of that happiness 
which the present denies us, be rid of all those 
petty annoyances which mar so effectively the 
illusive blissfulness of to-day. At fifty years 
of age, we say to ourselves when young, we shall 
have made sufficient money to retire, and, retir¬ 
ing, will be able to live that kind of life after 
which our innermost heart more greatly yearns. 
We forget that at fifty — we shall, alas! be 
fifty; and, as some one has disagreeably re¬ 
minded us, after fifty years of age the best things 
of life are behind us and all the more unpleasant 
things are well on the way. Looking back on 
my own life, I am invariably struck by the fact 
122 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 


that the most trite adage is usually the most 
true. For example, the disappointment of am¬ 
bition is that the only happiness it contains lies 
in the struggle to achieve it; that the attainment 
of it is not at all the wonderful thing we believed 
it would be. We hated the struggle at the time. 
It is only when the struggle is over, and we may, 
as it were, sit back in our easy-chair, put our 
feet on the mantelpiece and criticize the younger 
generation adversely, that we realize that the 
easy-chair doesn’t seem nearly so comfortable 
as it did when we sat on it for the first time; 
that to sit with our feet on the mantelpiece 
becomes an uncomfortable position very soon, 
and that the younger generation we criticize 
seem to be enjoying themselves far more than 
we are, and don’t really care a rap for our critical 
attitude. 

The truth is that nothing ever does give us 
the unalloyed joy we expected it to give. Love 
doesn’t give us happiness; it gives us—just love, 
accompanied by a good many agonizing mo¬ 
ments. Work does not bring us happiness; it 
brings us merely the satisfaction of labour. 
Neither does ease. Neither do friends and 
acquaintances. Neither does religion, nor 
beauty, nor youth. Happiness, I sometimes 
123 


SOME CONFESSIONS 


think, is a word which should always be preceded 
by a verb in the past tense, or, maybe, by one 
in the future. But we never realize it when it is 
by our side, walking with us hand in hand. At 
that moment we view it, if we consider it at all, 
as an “ absence of pain ” — as Schopenhauer 
did — a kind of peaceful prelude to some actual 
joy long anticipated. But somehow that actual 
joy is never realized. So we wake up at last to 
the fact that the only happiness it contained, lay 
in its one-time promise, or as the memory of that 
promise, half-fulfilled — a memory which be¬ 
comes the more resplendent as it recedes into the 
past. There is nearly always a flaw in the 
amber, as the saying goes; but it looks so small 
as to be almost invisible as we look at it from a 
distance. When we actually possess that amber, 
it is human nature to regard that flaw far more 
steadfastly than the beauty which surrounds it. 

As a matter of fact, we none of us know in 
what real happiness consists. We think we do, 
so we set forth to capture it. That it always 
eludes our grasp makes many of us extremely 
“ disgruntled ” with things as they are. For one 
thing, most of us make the mistake of believing 
that happiness is some big, concrete, permanent 
thing. It isn’t. It consists in just those in- 
124 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 


numerable teeny-weeny moments of joy which 
are scattered through even the dullest, longest 
day — so teeny-weeny, in fact, that we often 
don’t perceive them, though without them we 
should, most of us, be driven to suicide. Hope, 
memories, the glory of the sunset, the wonder of 
the dawn, the clasp of a hand in friendship, the 
kiss of love, the pageant of the seasons as they 
come and go, the rest after labour, the resump¬ 
tion of work after long repose, the blessing of 
sleep at night, the gratification that we can meet 
our creditors; art, music, the lively joy of a 
pleasant pastime, the thrill of something mas¬ 
tered at long-last, the temporary respite from 
some unpleasant duty, an alleviated pain — the 
hundred and one momentary pleasures to which 
it seems contemptible to give the name of Happi¬ 
ness, but which are Happiness nevertheless — 
the only unalloyed moments of happiness we 
ever know. The glory is that there are so many 
of them; our shame that we appreciate them so 
seldom and let them pass away unthanked so 
often. 


12S 


SOME CONFESSIONS 


One Way of Looking at a Debt Repaid 

T3EOPLE w ho go forth into the world looking 
for gratitude are simply asking for disap¬ 
pointment. Personally, I am not quite sure 
that they ought to expect to come across it. To 
feel grateful is usually another way of saying 
that you feel inferior. And people hate to feel 
inferior. Thus, acts which on the surface look 
extremely like gratitude are really and truly 
the method by which one person recovers his 
equality with another. Some one does you a 
favour, and oh! you are so pleased! But you 
are not half so pleased as when you are able to 
return that favour, and so have no further 
necessity to feel grateful. If you can return 
that favour with interest, you are more pleased 
still. By just so much as your favour exceeds 
the favour you received do you then feel supe¬ 
rior. Moreover, and this also must be taken 
into consideration, the generous person always 
feels himself secretly elated by his generosity. 
It may be a very glorious elation, but he does 
feel that, by his act of charity, he has gone up 
one step in his own estimation, and God is sure 
126 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 


to be delighted. And, perhaps, that emotion 
should be his only reward — the only reward 
he is entitled to expect. In the same way, the 
man who has benefited by that act of kindness 
feels at a discount with himself until he has 
wiped it off by an act placed to the credit side 
of his drawing account on virtue. Very true 
indeed is the saying: “ It is more blessed to 
give than to receive.” It is! By such blessings 
we seem to rise superior to the common herd, 
and feel, as it were, that now at least we can 
wipe off some of our minor sins and still leave 
a little virtue in hand for a day when the devil 
pops into tea. “ I am indebted to you for so 
many things!” says the Unfortunate Man, 
the while he mentally contrives to pay off that 
debt as quickly as he can. “ Don’t mention 
it,” we reply, being extremely annoyed if he 
doesn’t. Thus, the adage to do good by stealth 
is asking for an act of pure heroism which few 
people can achieve. After all, as most people 
sum it up, if I am expected to feel grateful, 
there was no real altruism behind the generosity 
of which I was the object. It was just a “ loan,” 
with gratitude demanded as a percentage until 
that loan is wiped off. 

And alas! experience and observation force 
127 


SOME CONFESSIONS 


me to the conclusion that most people do regard 
their generosity as a loan. If they cannot hope 
for an act of generosity in return, the only thing 
which will eventually wipe off the debt — and 
nothing but death does really wipe it off — is a 
loud and lifelong gratitude. So it all evolves 
itself at least into a kind of virtuous exchange. 
I raise my hat to a lady, and she bows acknowl¬ 
edgment. I have got my reward. If, however, 
she only nods, I feel that she still owes me some¬ 
thing; and, if she stares at me unblinkingly 
and passes on, I feel towards her something 
of the feeling which a man has in his heart for 
the thief who has picked his pocket. She has 
stolen the goods without paying for them. And, 
as with this minute form of give and get-back, 
so with the more important ones. Thus it is 
that I am convinced that the man who deliber¬ 
ately and with a joyful heart sets forth to be 
generous has no more reason to demand grati¬ 
tude in return than the man who lends money in 
all directions and expects to get it back again, 
with or without interest. Thus, when I lend 
money (which is rare, since experience has edu¬ 
cated me to the knowledge that I ought never 
to have done it at all), I always immediately 
place the loan among the rest of my bad debts. 

128 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 

I may get it back, in which case it will seem 
almost like a present from on high. But I 
don’t expect to; consequently, I am not liable 
to be disappointed. But what I do realize — 
and the realization gives my soul a certain 
amount of comfort — is that I have placed at 
least one act to the credit side of that ledger 
which the Recording Angel, otherwise my own 
conscience, is supposed to keep for future refer¬ 
ence. And that reward is the only one I have 
any right to, or should look to receive. In fact, 
I sometimes think that we ought to feel ex¬ 
tremely grateful to ungrateful people. They 
provide us with a balance of virtue on the credit 
side. When they return our generosity by an act 
of generosity to us, they wipe off the debt, and 
thus diminish that balance considerably. So we 
are left alone with the memory of our own short¬ 
lived satisfaction, a state of beatitude which, 
pondered over to excess, will sooner or later turn 
us into sanctimonious prigs. After all, the gen¬ 
erous man who expects gratitude is not far re¬ 
moved from the money-lender who demands a 
high percentage. If he gets it, he is satisfied; if 
he doesn’t, hell is let loose in the land. But none 
of us have a very high opinion of the pure altru¬ 
ism of money-lenders, have we? 

129 


SOME CONFESSIONS 


Clean Honesty of Youth 

T ALWAYS think that one of the saddest 
1 things to watch in all life is the gradual 
change in the eyes of youth from the pagan 
truthfulness of young life to the furtive slyness 
of the adult. Youth may often be obscene, but 
its obscenity is the obscenity of the savage — 
something natural, and, because natural, inof¬ 
fensive. Grown-up people are rarely obscene 
— they have cultivated the “camouflage” of 
polite society. But to regard old Adam peeping 
cautiously from behind that camouflage is a dis¬ 
gusting sight, because it is so dishonest, so hypo¬ 
critical in its masked impurity. There is nothing 
quite so indecent as a fig-leaf, nor anything more 
crudely filthy than the wisp of tulle which is 
blown by some mysterious wind conveniently 
across the nude. The Elizabethan drama with 
its outspoken bawdiness is far less indelicate 
than the modern Palais Royal farce written 
around the promiscuousness of hotel bedrooms, 
the authors seeking to create in their audience 
that laughter which comes from a sight of the 
semi-unveiled — the disgusting furtive raising of 
the cloak which drapes decency, making even 
130 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 


the glimpse of a stocking-suspender creative of 
the shamed “ guffaw/’ the hysteria due to re¬ 
pressed desire — so ugly because repressed. 

Young people may often call a spade “ a 
spade ” among themselves, but just because they 
call it a spade without the sly snigger by which 
their elders refer to it, it outrages the inner feel¬ 
ings infinitely less. It is when they have learned 
to copy the hypocrisy of their elders, in reference 
to the facts of life, that their “ smut ” becomes 
disgusting — a nasty, slimy dalliance with what 
should be a perfectly healthy understanding. 

One of the most tragic discoveries of youth is 
the discovery that age is by no means all it 
preaches; that for the most part it tries to hide 
its own shortcomings behind a sermon delivered 
to youth. If only young people could express 
themselves in words, I sometimes think that the 
book they would write on grown-up people 
might easily electrify their readers. But their 
knowledge comes so slowly. They have become 
used to it long before they realize that by it they 
have found their elders out. By this time they 
have become sly and furtive themselves. Their 
eyes no longer show that clean healthy laughter 
of a mind unashamed of its own longings. They 
have learnt to wink, to lower their voices, to 
131 


SOME CONFESSIONS 


slink down the dark alleys of their own nature — 
alleys darkened artificially — to hide themselves 
therein, to don the mask of hypocrisy and to 
preach and to pretend. Up to a certain age chil¬ 
dren obey their parents unthinkingly; after that 

— they judge them. Happily, however, by the 
time they have reached that mature age which 
could put judgment into forcible language, they 
are then among the “ judged.” So they say 
nothing, lest in saying everything they unmask 
the false ideals of their own generation — and 
each generation has to stand together, just as 
each class has to stand together, for fear that, 
disunited and exposed, they fall in ignominy. 

It always secretly amuses me to watch the hid¬ 
den regard which little children give each other 
after their elders have issued that popular 
elderly edict which begins with the word 
“ Don’t ” and may end with a whipping! It is as 
if they said to each other: “ Aren’t they queer 

— these grown-up people? We shall have to 
obey them, because a whipping is unpleasant — 
but what victims they are of their own unimag¬ 
inative stupidity!” So they don’t do what they 
ought not to do, and do it quite without convic¬ 
tion that it is at the same time right. Their 
elders call them very obedient, and usually go 

132 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 


and do the reprimanded thing themselves — or 
something so nearly approaching it as to make 
no difference in the eyes of their children. And 
so these same children gradually wake up to the 
fact that almost everything is allowed to any¬ 
body providing they are grown-up. Even they, 
the children, can have it — providing they cam¬ 
ouflage their intention at the same time and are 
not likely to be found out. What is called a 
“ deliberate falsehood ” in her child is termed by 
its mother a a polite fiction ” when she, herself, 
utters the lie. Her great surprise comes when 
her children judge her by the same standard by 
which she once judged them. “ Grown-up 
people can do these things,” she would likely 
say, should she ever learn that judgment — 
which happily for her self-respect, she rarely 
does. And so there is born in the young mind 
the realization that there is one moral law for 
youth and a much easier one for their elders. 
They look to their parents to find examples of 
their own precepts — only to discover a politely 
camouflaged mass of error, calling that error by 
quite another name, a name quite staggeringly 
erroneous. 

And so, as I wrote above, to watch the gradual 
flight of the clean honesty of youth, and the 
133 


SOME CONFESSIONS 


equally gradual approach of the sly hypocrisy 
of age, is one of the saddest things in life. One 
does not so much regret the passing of innocence 
as dislike the furtive acknowledgment of truth 
which supplants it. It is the slow moulding of 
honest youth to the sly hypocrisy of adult life 
which robs human existence of a very blessed 
beauty. It is the gradual belief that an innuendo 
is essentially more “ refined ” than an outspoken 
fact, which slurs, with a thin layer of slime, 
things which should really be as clean as pol¬ 
ished marble. It is the gradual realization in the 
minds of youth that the basest intentions can be 
quite successfully masked behind some high- 
sounding word — which adds a dreariness to 
growing-up. It is the knowledge, which youth 
learns from age, that everything is permitted, 
providing that you disguise it as something else, 
which adds an unnecessary ugliness to that nat¬ 
ural life we should all lead. It is the sad accept¬ 
ance of the fact that everything conventional is 
natural, which puts a mask of “ Tartuffian ” 
hypocrisy in front of Nature — Nature which 
should be the most honest and the most cleanly 
thing in the world, if God, as we are told by 
grown-up people, really did make man in His 
own image. 


134 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 


The Unimportant Glories 

rpHE physical aspect is so important in regard 
A to love and friendship that it is stupid to 
infer that the Evil One works behind every good 
dressmaker, and that a man who makes the best 
of himself is encouraged in his fancy by the 
devil. Of course, there are a dozen ways of 
making the best of oneself, of which to dress well 
is but a primitive example of its technique. But 
no man or woman who desires to be loved — and 
all desire to be the object of some one’s affection 
— should deliberately issue forth arrayed in 
metaphorical curl-papers. They may appear be¬ 
fore the world inspired by the very highest moral 
and altruistic motives; but, should they “ cut a 
ridiculous figure,” their influence will be nil. Of 
course, only the empty-headed sentimentalist is 
content to play up to any kind of audience; 
but to find some kind of audience — even if it be 
merely an audience of one — is necessary to the 
happiness of life. We may be kings or queens, 
princes, potentates or pioneers, but daily life, 
when all is said and done, is, for the most part, 
135 


SOME CONFESSIONS 


just getting up in the morning, eating, drinking, 
making merry with our friends, working, and 
going to bed at night hoping for at least six 
hours’ sleep. The interludes in this prosaic rou¬ 
tine may be glorious, but their glory is transi¬ 
tory. Taken in the aggregate, existence is for 
the most part commonplace. The “ interrup¬ 
tions ” may be thrilling, absorbing, magnificent, 
but au fond , the heart realizes that they don’t 
very much matter. What the heart and “ soul ” 
are aiming after instinctively, is the discovery 
that in the everyday of prose there is some one 
who robs the world of its loneliness, makes our 
efforts seem worth while, gives “ poetry ” to the 
matter-of-fact curriculum by which we gain a 
wider knowledge of the due meaning of life. 


136 




OF AN AVERAGE MAN 


Loneliness 


RITE,” said a poor maiden-lady to me, 



" * “ write of the loneliness of England.” 

“I might have enjoyed the two years I lived in 
France and Italy had I not been so lonely,” a 
young business man once told me. “ London 
is the loneliest place in the world,” some people 
will say; others that the country bores them; 
those who have been there, that America is a 
terribly lonely country, unless you happen to be 
very rich. In other words, the whole world is a 
very lonely place. And alas; it is! But why — 
why? It shouldn’t be. In all conscience there 
are plenty of people in it — too many for my 
liking. Yet each one ploughs a very lonely fur¬ 
row. A thousand and one almost unsurmount- 
able barriers separate people, few of which are 
necessary, and most of which are stupid. Men 
live as if the most suspicious thing in life were 
their brother-men. They regard them as their 
potential enemies until they have proved them¬ 
selves to be friendly, and even then, men are 


137 


SOME CONFESSIONS 


supposed to choose their friends from a very 
restricted social area. 

Perhaps the greatest barrier of all is that 
mediaeval thing called Class. Class presupposes 
the assumption that we may live with, and be 
seen on terms of intimacy with, a dull lawyer, 
but not with an entertaining butcher. I am 
not a naturalist, so do not know if “ snobbism ” 
exists in the animal world. But I do know that 
it exists in the human world, and that it places 
mankind immeasurably below the meanest thing 
created in regard to social intelligence. If class 
were a thing to be judged by merit, it would be 
entirely sensible. But as it is, the social claims 
of one man above another are judged by nothing 
more convincing than the superiority of one 
whose home is surrounded by a garden, above 
another who possesses only a backyard wherein 
his underclothes wave indelicately once a week 
on a clothesline. The desire of most people to 
know only those of a more luxurious position in 
life, however dull and pompous they may be, is 
only equalled by their dread of getting to know 
those whose worldly state is less ornate than 
their own. I always think that the greatest ex¬ 
ample of unintelligence is shown by the manner 
in which human beings mix with their brother 
138 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 


men to the end of intellectual entertainment. 
If civilization is to be judged by its social 
amenities, it is the poorest possible dish to 
set before a travelling king from another star. 

It always secretly amuses me to observe the 
subtle cross-questioning one has to go through 
after an introduction to a stranger. His object 
is to find out, not whether you are honest, or 
straightforward, amusing or merely dull, but if 
you have been to a public school, are a bank 
clerk, are “ in trade ” or of independent means; 
if you happen to mix with the “ best people ” 
or only — just “ people if you are a man he 
can safely invite to his home — not from any 
dread that you may drink, or steal the silver, or 
try to make love to his wife; but merely if you 
are likely to use a spoon and fork to eat jelly, or 
wear a coloured waistcoat with your evening 
clothes. And then the formality of the Intro¬ 
duction! It is as if those to whom we are 
introduced felt themselves in some moral or 
financial danger until they know that the name 
we call ourselves by is really the name we bear 
— as vouched for by an acquaintance. It is as if 
everybody feared that the unknown person with 
whom they might carry on a casual conversation 
would suddenly throw their arms around their 
139 


SOME CONFESSIONS 


necks and kiss them in public; or worse still, 
turn out to be a tax-gatherer or a shop-assistant. 

And take again the absurd barrier set up 
between men by that labour upon the proceeds 
of which they live. The honest, hard-working, 
intelligent young mechanic is socially as nothing 
beside the young man of independent means who 
spends his time mostly in night clubs, in knock¬ 
ing a ball hither and thither with wooden clubs 
of varying shapes, or in killing animals — infin¬ 
itely less harmful and infinitely more beautiful 
than he is himself. All through the various 
grades of society this snobbery regarding work 
helps to separate men and make them lonely. A 
“ season’s debutante ” will patronize a hard¬ 
working young actress, because she, the debu¬ 
tante, is not obliged to labour; and the daughter 
of a publican will hold her head very high if she 
be a typist and “ cut ” her former school-friend 
because she happens to be “ in service.” I 
always think that the aristocracy and the dust¬ 
man have this link in common — the one has, 
socially speaking, nowhere else to soar, the other, 
also socially speaking, can descend no further. 
Consequently, providing they fulfil the conven¬ 
tions of their order, they will not be “ dropped.” 
Of course, there are “ tramps ” — but then 
140 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 


“ tramps ” compose merely the “ Bohemian set” 
of the lower orders. 

So even a man’s work may provide a barrier 
between himself and those with whom he would 
be likely to find tastes in common. Which fact 
would, perhaps, not be so absurd, were it not for 
the recognized custom that a successful man’s 
wife, sons and daughters also believe they share 
his merit — to the detriment of families less suc¬ 
cessful in the race for a resplendent existence. 

Speaking personally, I am always thankful 
that I seem to have been born with no vestige of 
the “ class sense.” I find my friends in the most 
unlikely places and — as viewed through the 
spectacles of my maiden-aunts — among the 
most “ impossible ” people. But the fact is that, 
when I feel drawn towards somebody, I care not 
who they may be, what they may have done, or 
whither they may be bound — socially or finan¬ 
cially. I have discovered that only those to 
whom we are drawn irresistibly have anything to 
give us or we to offer them. The people who 
only look for their friends among those inhabit¬ 
ing the same restricted neighbourhood, mov¬ 
ing in the same restricted social “ set ” — must 
either be very unimaginative, or possess that 
type of mind which, so long as it is uttering its 
141 


SOME CONFESSIONS 


“ pet ” platitudes to somebody, invariably feels 
as if it were being nicely entertained. These 
people look to find in their “ friends ” nothing 
more thrilling than a pair of ears, a public school 
accent, well-cut clothes and a mental state which 
appears satisfied by listening to a recital of some¬ 
body else’s daily trivial round and relating their 
own in their turn, for just so long as there is 
some one near at hand who will not interrupt 
them too often. No wonder, when these people 
find themselves alone, they are lonely. But their 
loneliness is not pitiable. And real loneliness is 
very pitiable indeed — even though it is a sign 
of social cowardice very often. 

One of the most thrilling, as well — and I 
must confess it! — the most tardy discoveries of 
my life was the fact that the world is full of the 
most amusing and interesting people if only you 
have the courage to seek them out. When I was 
a very young man, I — like most young men — 
hugged to my breast secret social ambitions. I 
believed, also like most young men, and many 
considerably older, that the people above me 
socially, who showed no urgent desire to know 
me, must consequently be worth knowing. I was 
not exactly a “ snob,” but it thrilled me to think 
that I stood, and could be seen, metaphorically 
142 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 

speaking, on the doormat of the Great occasion¬ 
ally. I was immensely impressed by false social 
values. I believed that the atmosphere in which 
my Ego could widest expand lay somewhere be¬ 
tween Belgrave Square and the Savoy Hotel. 
Could I command the spiritual resources of that 
locality, I felt that I might find therein a spirit¬ 
ual home. They were the years when I found a 
greater satisfaction walking side by side with 
some one superlatively well-dressed though dull, 
than walking side by side with some one quite 
interesting, or amusing, but clothed as from the 
leavings of a rummage sale. They were the 
years when a reflected glory was very satisfying. 
I wanted to be judged by my “ friends ” and 
they consequently must be of a very enviable 
order. It lasted for quite a long period — this 
state of seeking inner satisfaction among purely 
artificial values. Then, at last, I found out that 
bores are confined to no class, that they are 
everywhere, and that the only social set 
worth living for is the “ set ” you make for your¬ 
self out of all the heterogeneous collection of 
humanity who daily line your path. I realized 
then that dull people, unless useful from a purely 
business standpoint, are best “ dropped no 
matter what may be their station in life. To keep 
143 


SOME CONFESSIONS 


up acquaintanceship with them only adds yet 
another troublesome interruption to the thrilling 
adventure of life. There is no greater ennui than 
knowing too many people — none of whom you 
will care two straws if you never see again. 
And this, after all, is but a picture of what 
people call “ society ” — be it exclusive or very 
Bohemian. Keep your “ mere acquaintances ” 
without a radius of fifty miles. Nearer than that, 
be sure they will come to see you just when 
you don’t want them, or you will run across 
them just when mutual small-talk will only 
provide ten minutes of pronounced distaste. 
Think of all the long and weary hours of life we 
spend talking to people who don’t interest us, 
trying to entertain people who are not at all 
entertained by our efforts; and then remember 
how short life is — and what emotional experi¬ 
ences each day may contain if we do not fritter 
away the hours by merely offering ourselves in 
sacrifice to some polite fetish. Be hide-bound by 
no class prejudice and you will never be really 
lonely, that is, never more lonely than we all of 
us are, and most of us must be, in life. Don’t 
question your friends, and be even less inquisi¬ 
tive regarding mere acquaintances. After all, 
what does it matter who a man may be so long as 
144 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 


for half an hour, when you find yourself discuss¬ 
ing with him a certain topic, he interests you. 
That is all that matters, so far as he is con¬ 
cerned. Build your life up around a very few 
people and only those whom you are able to love. 
Ignore the others surrounding you; otherwise 
they will merely prove tiresome and never for 
one instant help you onward and upward. The 
adventure of life is so thrilling; the world is so 
wide; the variety of human beings so great that 
it is foolish to restrict yourself merely to one set 
of people, to confine your energies within one 
special code; to imprison yourself behind the 
bars of what at its best is merely prejudice and 
convention. If you set out to choose your 
friends, you will never find the friends you seek. 
You can’t choose friendship, any more than you 
can choose love. The choice is made within you 
— by some spiritual or physical need within you 
which the soul recognizes as beauty. 

Friendship — real friendship — is at all times 
indefinable. But having found your friend, give 
of yourself with both hands. The intimate 
knowledge of another mind is as an opening into 
a new world, an education in itself. But friends 
have to be sought; they will rarely come deliber¬ 
ately to seek you out. They await you on the 
145 


SOME CONFESSIONS 


high roads; very rarely in your own drawing¬ 
room. There are few moments quite so desolate 
as those wasted on mere social amenities. To 
find a friend — even one friend — is worth the 
sacrifice, if sacrifice be necessary, of a hundred 
so-called “ friends ” — because you can’t call 
them anything else, since you address them by 
their Christian names and dine with them quite 
often; and a thousand of those acquaintances 
who masquerade as “ friends,” whose society is 
at all times a perpetually tiresome interruption 
to the romantic game of life. 

I only ask of my own friends two gifts — the 
gift of laughter and the genius to ignore 
“ shams.” 

Above all, don't pretend. We are loved just 
as much for the qualities we lack as for those 
virtues which we may possess. Nature recog¬ 
nizes no “ soul ” barriers — other than the bar¬ 
rier of dislike. And that should be the only bar¬ 
rier which separates one man from another. And 
among the “ dislikes ” I count “ bores ” far 
above enemies — since real enemies are as rare 
as real friends. Most people, who immediately 
surround us, are a dreary compromise between 
the two — that is why they are to be avoided 
like all compromises. 

146 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 


On Managing Other People 

T SUPPOSE that the two most “ perfect ” 
* beings in the whole world are bachelors’ 
“ wives ” and old maids’ “ children.” At least, 
if you really want to learn how a woman should 
be managed — listen to almost any bachelor on 
the subject; while, as regards the upbringing 
of the young — every spinster lady will tell you 
exactly how it should, or, as is more generally 
the case, how it should not be carried out. In 
fact, nearly everybody holds pronounced opin¬ 
ions about the difficulties they have never been 
called upon to solve. It is human nature to be 
wise before and after, but rarely during the 
event. And if these two — a bachelor’s “ wife ” 
and an old maid’s “ child ” — are invariably per¬ 
fect examples of the good effect of one person 
upon another, so the most imperfect is always 
the man who is directed by women (according to 
other men) and the child which is brought up by 
a man (according to other women). There is 
one thing which every man prides himself upon 
being able to make a success of, that is, his man- 
147 


SOME CONFESSIONS 


agement of some woman; while scarcely a 
woman does not feel that a child delivered solely 
into her care would develop all those qualities 
and virtues likely to make it feel quite “ at 
home ” even among the dwellers in heaven. It 
all belongs to that human weakness which likes 
to imagine that if we cannot lead all men, we can 
at any rate manage quite easily those with whom 
we are brought in contact. But the great diffi¬ 
culty in dealing with men and women is, that 
each one of them is a separate individual, and he 
who looks quite pliable and placid at a polite 
distance, can be a mass of acute angles when you 
have to live with him in close intimacy. One 
may exist quite peacefully with a thief, whereas 
to live with some one who likes his bedroom 
window hermetically sealed at night may easily 
prove such an obstacle to happiness that only 
death or long separation will mellow one’s sense 
of exasperation. They are not the big things 
which divide people, but the comparatively 
harmless little trifles, so trifling as to appear 
negligible, until long familiarity makes them 
appear colossal. 

It is safe to say that, according to women, no 
man can bring up a child — especially no un¬ 
married man. Why matrimony should suddenly 
148 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 

give married people a knowledge of the manage¬ 
ment of children I can never imagine. I have 
known so many parents who were no more capa¬ 
ble of bringing up a family than they were 
capable of scaling Mount Blanc in dancing 
“ pumps.” On the other hand, I have known 
many a bachelor and many a single woman 
whose children would not only have known hap¬ 
piness, but would have been given that best pos¬ 
sible “ chance in life ” — which is surely the 
main raison d'etre of successful parenthood. As 
for women, up to the age of eighteen the educa¬ 
tion of a child is surely their natural right. After 
that age, the influence of the right kind of man 
will be of far greater benefit. There is nothing 
quite so cramping as a too absorbent “ mother 
love ” towards children who are making tenta¬ 
tive attempts to spread their wings and develop 
their own individual characters. Very few 
mothers like to own to themselves that their 
children are growing up and so demand the right 
to become independent individuals. Men are 
much more tolerant of this spirit of youthful in¬ 
dependence. The reason why many homes 
resemble so many comfortable prisons is the 
fact that very few children can develop them¬ 
selves therein. They are expected to live at 
149 


SOME CONFESSIONS 


twenty as they lived at sixteen. How many 
homes there are which are like well-upholstered 
cells with “ closed doors ” to the children who 
live therein. Consequently they seek outside for 
that wider life, and for the solution of those 
many problems which will always beset youth. 
If only parents could come down from their 
pedestals and own to a common humanity with 
their own children, many a young life might be 
saved from meeting disaster at the very first 
chance it is given to stand alone in a world of 
men. 

It takes a very big-natured man and woman to 
own to imperfections in conversation with their 
children or with others much younger than 
themselves. Age always likes to feel itself re¬ 
spected, even if it be only for its antiquity. It 
can so seldom realize that, up to a certain age, 
youth accepts age unquestioningly, but that, 
later on, it also judges it. And the parent who is 
“ found out ” is judged more harshly than them 
all. I suppose it is rather hard when, after years 
of having wielded the metaphorical cane, one has 
to own that in many instances one also richly 
deserves a beating. Yet it has to be done, unless 
youth is to lose touch with its elders; it has 
to be done if age is to help youth in even the 
150 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 


slightest extent along the rough road of life. 
And very few people, in spite of what they pro¬ 
fess, realize that example is infinitely more val¬ 
uable than precept. Precepts are so much easier 
to give, and there is a kind of “ bouquet of 
flowers ” about delivering them which is dis¬ 
tinctly gratifying, even if you only present it to 
yourself. As a matter of fact, I believe that the 
only moral lessons young people ever do learn 
are the moral lessons of example. The rest 
leaves them cold, or merely bores them. Thus 
the influence of a bad home affects a man all his 
life long, and many a youthful delinquent stand¬ 
ing in the dock ought to have his place taken by 
his mother or his father. I often wonder how 
many eighteen-year-old criminals have ever been 
ultimately reformed. Not many, I am certain. 
Give a child a good home up to seventeen, and I 
care not what becomes of him afterwards. He 
will never go very far, nor very long, along the 
road which leads to perdition, unless he has in¬ 
herited some criminal instinct from an ancestor. 


151 


SOME CONFESSIONS 


God's Hobby 

pEOPLE who are artificial in a garden belong 
1 to that type which, if they met you in 
heaven, would say, “ Pleased to make your 
acquaintance,” all the while they priced the 
value of your celestial robe. A garden is not 
only a great test of character, but also of that 
“ genuineness ” which belongs to honesty of pur¬ 
pose. A man or woman who can “ pose ” among 
flowers will never anywhere be natural. To be 
in the country is a great self-revelation. . . . 
For no one can pose or do society “ stunts ” in 
the garden of a true gardener. . . . There is 
no knowing what people will turn into after they 
have lived in a garden for a while. Indeed, it 
may be said that one does not really know any¬ 
one until one has been alone with him among 
flowers. Nature, who never twaddles, abhors 
twaddlers, and he who still insists upon “ pre¬ 
tending ” when alone with Nature, possesses a 
character so shallow and artificial that he will 
quite naturally “ pretend ” with God. The great 
joy of friendship is to perceive something of that 
152 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 


real character which few of us reveal except 
when we are face to face with Nature. I may 
even go so far as to say that, speaking person¬ 
ally, I never fully trust the man who neither 
loves animals nor loves a garden. Certainly I 
can never like him. If God has a “ hobby,” I 
think His hobby must be gardening. Flowers 
are a greater purification of the “ soul ” than all 
the moral tracts in all the world. The man who 
works in a garden because he loves it cannot be 
thinking evil at the same time. To love Nature 
is to love beauty, and beauty is, after all, but a 
subtle manifestation of some divine truth! 


153 


SOME CONFESSIONS 


On Falling out of Love 

rno fall in love is an “ adventure ” — perilous 
A often, but thrilling at all times. To fall 
out of love is tragedy, offering no excitement at 
all, only a dreary period of self-mortification, a 
kind of shamed retreat back along the primrose 
path from which all the primroses seem to have 
disappeared. All the time one has to bluff one’s 
way back to one’s own self-respect, and to ex¬ 
plain one’s return to the world, whose only greet¬ 
ing is the cry, “ I told you so!” An undignified 
and desolate situation. It is as if we had once 
set out with a crown on our heads and a sceptre 
in our hands, and had to explain to ourselves and 
to everybody else just why we have come back 
crowned only by an old cloth cap, carrying a 
walking stick. We feel we have been sold — 
worse even, that we have sold ourselves. There 
are so many kinds of love, but alas! we can’t 
know if it be real love, or merely some kind of 
physical attraction, until we have put it to that 
test which is at all times final, and against which 
there is no appeal, only a dreary making-the- 
1S4 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 

best-of-things. And if there be any tragedy 
worse than waking up one fine morning to the 
realization that we have staked our all on a bad 
bargain, and yet have to pay the original price, 
and go on paying it — I do not want to experi¬ 
ence it, either in this life or in the next. If only 
love could reason! Then it might at least re¬ 
serve one way of escape. But love is at all times 
passionate — and in passion there is no such 
thing as a moment of cool calculation. People 
in love usually see too much of each other for 
safety, and not enough for satiety. One can 
build up the most fairy-like romances around 
some one we only see, say, twice a week; whereas 
it is very difficult to preserve the atmosphere of 
romance around an “ idol ” we are alone with 
twelve hours out of every twenty-four. Propin¬ 
quity can create love; it can also kill it. Un¬ 
fortunately we never know if propinquity will 
put it to death until we have passed that barrier 
which precludes any possibility of retracing our 
footsteps. There is no awakening so dreary as 
that which discovers for you the fact that you 
have given yourself away to some one with 
whom you share nothing vital in common; that, 
in reality, the one you love is a “ stranger ” 
whom you have kissed and held in your arms 
155 


SOME CONFESSIONS 


under the delusion that he was somebody quite 
different from what he is — some one who only 
really existed in your own imagination. 

All the world loves a lover, even, sometimes 
an illicit one, providing he is brave enough to 
pay the price. But for those who, to their own 
mortification, have fallen out of love — there is 
no pity. And yet they are so greatly in need of 
sympathy — as every one is who has staked his 
all for a “ beautiful vision ” and only obtained 
an ugly commonplace fact. It is rare to find 
some one who will sympathize with you in your 
mistakes, however honestly you made them. 
And love, alas! often turns out to be a hideous 
mistake. Sometimes I think that the poor are 
so much wiser in their sentimental intuitions 
than their social betters. They have a conven¬ 
tion called “ walking out ” which is a very wise 
proceeding. A long and lonely walk will often 
reveal truths which no period of general conver¬ 
sation or flirtations on sofas will discover. More¬ 
over, there is nothing definite in “ walking out.” 
It is just a kind of social recreation — since there 
are no tea-parties, nor dances, nor other more 
or less frivolous amenities to provide men and 
women with opportunities to play the sex game 
out before an audience and with each other. 
156 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 

Send two people in love for a long day in the 
country alone, and they will return under the 
impression that they have both been in the 
seventh heaven. Send them out the next day; 
they will come back with the idea that only the 
fifth heaven lay around them. Send them out 
the day following, and they will return well- 
nigh matter-of-fact. Keep sending them out — 
and before very long ninety per cent will return 
home quite bored. True it is that sometimes a 
definite engagement will add a new thrill to their 
intimacy. The “ future ” will give them a new 
topic to talk over. They will lay plans for a 
mutual happiness to come and very often they 
will believe that in designing this future exist¬ 
ence for themselves their very “ souls ” have met 
in everlasting understanding. But the real test 
of their devotion will only come when they have 
“ found each other out.” And it takes sometimes 
a long period of intimacy alone and undisturbed, 
before that essential discovery is made. But, 
take it from me, everybody has to be found out 
before they can honestly declare that they are 
loved! It is not that we wilfully deceive those 
who adore us. The fact is that we never know 
the kind of image which those who love us fash¬ 
ioned in their hearts before they knew us for 
157 


SOME CONFESSIONS 

what we really are. The one who is loved most 
steadfastly is the one who is loved in spite of 
himself. We all of us carry in our hearts an 
“ ideal,” and it is human nature to believe that 
this ideal has suddenly materialized when, truth¬ 
fully, all that lent it reality was a charming face, 
crowned by a charming hat, making charming 
eyes at us during a charming afternoon. Only a 
lengthy propinquity will make us realize upon 
what slight foundations we built our faith, and 
help us to disentangle the real ego from its sur¬ 
rounding scenic effects. This is where the poor 
are unconsciously wiser than the rich in their 
sentimental dalliance. There is, for example, 
nothing improper in a girl typist and a young 
clerk spending their holidays together. Nor is 
there anything like a holiday spent alone with 
some one for the discovery to be made that our 
travelling companion is most delightful when 
seen at odd intervals, and not from breakfast in 
the morning until bed-time at night continuously 
for a fortnight on end. That is why I believe 
in long engagements. A long engagement gives 
lovers time to quarrel — and they will quarrel, 
sooner or later, as we all must quarrel with those 
who do not always live up to the ideal we have 
raised around them in our own hearts. It is after 
158 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 

we have quarrelled with those we love that we 
really begin to love them — love them, or, per¬ 
chance, grow indifferent. Until two people have 
ceased to play up to one another — either con¬ 
sciously or unconsciously — they can never 
really know if their love be founded on physical 
allurement or real understanding of each other’s 
“ soul.” Any woman can meet half-way under 
the stars any man who attracts her. The love of 
kisses and embraces is shared by all alike. But 
though most people can quite easily kiss eighty 
per cent of those of the opposite sex whom they 
meet through life, there are only ten per cent 
whom they could live with happily after they 
have grown weary of their kisses. The various 
love episodes in a man and woman’s life are, as 
it were, a kind of tentative winnowing of this 
eighty per cent until they have discovered the 
vital ten. Unfortunately, the social conventions 
insist upon every man and woman in love living 
up to the belief that the eighty per cent they 
could love for a time are to be treated by them 
as if that multitude belonged to the small elect. 
So we have that very common human tragedy — 
the tragedy of those who fall out of love and are 
disgraced accordingly. Personally, were the 
conventions a question of my own decree, I 
159 


SOME CONFESSIONS 


would have semi-engagements as well as full en¬ 
gagements ; provisional marriages as well as per¬ 
manent ones. It is so sad to realize that half 
the tears we shed come from mistakes we once 
made with the best intentions in the world. The 
world never takes the goodness of these inten¬ 
tions into consideration when it apportions 
blame. Our emotions have made fools of us, 
and our foolishness is considered criminal in¬ 
stead of being merely human. 


160 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 


Moral Education by Excess 

T SOMETIMES wonder whether the best 
A moral education would not be the education 
by excess. Repression never kills — it only adds 
to the thing repressed a greater vitality, a more 
enduring force. Repression is merely a kind of 
feeble panacea, a putting-off of the evil moment 
until such a time when no warning, no threat of 
punishment, nor realization of its dangers will 
longer thwart it of its little hour of life. And 
that moment will come — later, rather than 
sooner, it must be owned — but surely, never¬ 
theless. Which fact acknowledged always 
makes me extremely tolerant of those middle- 
aged people who, in a last burst of vital energy, 
kick over the traces and pull down with their 
own hands that conventional structure which 
they had built up through their lives so painfully 
— that structure which they hoped would last 
them as “ camouflage ” until the very end. That 
it often doesn’t is surely a fact worthy of pity, 
rather than condemnation. I know it is gener¬ 
al 


SOME CONFESSIONS 

ally believed that excess breeds greater excess; 
but experience teaches us that it usually kills all 
desire. Excess, if it breeds anything, breeds 
nausea — either acknowledged or secreted. Let 
me give one small banal example — though I 
apologize for its banality, while confessing a 
belief that what is true of small things is equally 
true of big important ones. All my life, until 
a few years ago, I had an insatiable longing for 
wedding-cake, especially the almond paste which 
crowns it. I never refused to eat thereof, no 
matter how often it was proffered me. Then, 
one fine day, I went with a friend to Buszards, 
and in a moment of psychological illumination 
purchased a big chunk of the blackest and rich¬ 
est wedding cake they manufactured. It gave 
me horrible indigestion, and I have disliked wed¬ 
ding-cake intensely ever since. Nowadays you 
could leave me with the most succulent slice, and 
I should not taste a crumb. And what is true of 
such physical “ appetites ” is equally true of 
“ appetites ” more dangerous to our moral well¬ 
being. It is a trite saying, of course, that the 
best husband is he who has sown the most wild 
oats. He often is. And this for the reason that 
he knows from experience that “ wild oats ” 
quickly become like tasteless husks when once 
162 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 


you have eaten of them to repletion. The more 
you repress a thing, the sturdier its hidden 
growth, the more irresistible its apparent attrac¬ 
tion. There is nothing quite so indecent as 
the veiled indecency — not any veil more useless 
for its purpose, since it softens the crude outline 
of the ugly and makes even the basest thing 
appear not wholly unattractive. A thoroughly 
obscene story is far more “ moral ” than a gaily 
suggested impropriety — since obscenity breeds 
an immediate revulsion, while innuendo inflames 
the imagination — lending an importance to 
something which, in bald language, would revolt 
by reason of its depravity. So the polite world 
decks out its vices in metaphorical pink ribbons 
and white lace, and, at the same time, expects 
the innocent to feel pride in their inexperience. 
Thou-shalt-not never has and never will achieve 
its purpose. Mostly it only increases a secret 
desire to taste of the forbidden fruit. I some¬ 
times think that the world would achieve a 
greater moral result if it allowed everybody to 
do what they wanted to do, and trust that, in 
doing it, they would soon discover that it wasn’t 
worth doing after all. As it is, people generally 
follow their desires, but so furtively, so occasion¬ 
ally, that their falling-away preserves all the 
163 


SOME CONFESSIONS 

attraction of novelty; they slink down the de¬ 
scending pathway so slowly that their progress 
becomes the more sure — and there is no hope of 
their ever retracing their footsteps until they 
have reached that miserable end — which is just 
“ Too late.” A good debauch at the beginning 
might have saved them. By all means let us cry 
Thou-shalt-not until a boy or a girl is twenty- 
one. They will then have a good physical 
account upon which to draw. But after that age 
— nobody can save them, if they will not save 
themselves. Better let them “ paddle their own 
canoe.” Given a free hand, they will not, unless 
they are preternaturally evil (in which case 
nothing will save them) go very far down the 
rapids. No normal person will sink very low if 
we keep him clean and healthy during the first 
twenty-one years of his life. If, later on, he 
shows some great inclination towards the things 
which only experience can teach him their utter 
unpleasantness, better let him go “ the whole 
hog ” deliberately and at once. He will soon 
want to struggle out of the slime and forever 
afterwards will look upon it as the nasty thing it 
is. Be sure he will, whatever we may do or say, 
put a metaphorical foot into the mud, and, hav¬ 
ing put in one foot he will put in another — 
164 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 


slowly, more and more at a time — until to live 
in the slime will seem only natural. A sudden 
early and complete immersion would probably 
have filled him with so much self-disgust that he 
will avoid it ever afterwards — not because he 
will be afraid of being found out, but because he 
will have found it out — and dislike the 
discovery. 

I know that such a theory will anger those 
who preach morality. But I have always found 
that those who preach morality usually know 
very little about true morals. They always 
praise those who flee from temptation, or those 
who have no inclination to indulge in that vice 
— that “ pet vice,” let it be added, which they, 
these moral preachers, always condemn above, 
and at the expense of, all other and maybe 
greater ones. But sometimes the best way to 
resist temptation is to fail to resist it; since it 
often happens that the surest shield against its 
subsequent attacks is to follow it to its lair and 
find its ugliness out by experience. Usually 
there is nothing quite so tasteless as Forbidden 
Fruit — though you have sometimes to eat 
thereof in order to discover the fact. As it is, the 
world, for the most part, decks out the Forbid¬ 
den Fruits in the gayest colours, refers to them 
165 


SOME CONFESSIONS 


in a jesting way, places samples of them here, 
there and everywhere, and ties a label on each 
bearing the words “ Thou shalt not eat.” Surely 
the most potent attraction that could ever make 
a tasteless thing seem succulent! If I were a 
parent, and a child of mine showed any powerful 
inclination to follow a direction likely to land 
him later on into difficulties, I would push him 
deliberately along it, until in sheer disgust — 
and youth is naturally very clean — he cried 
aloud to turn back. To “ stuff ” oneself with the 
Forbidden Fruits is often the most direct method 
to cease to desire any more. To nibble at them 
furtively is to imagine we enjoy the taste, be¬ 
sides making us imagine ourselves the gayest of 
gay “ dogs ” for doing so. If you must eat of 
them, it is better to eat of them to over-reple¬ 
tion; since, otherwise, they become like caviare 
— a “ treat,” not because we like it, but because 
it is so expensive and so rare, and because, tast¬ 
ing it so rarely, and procuring it with so much 
difficulty, we imagine that it must be good. But 
sometimes a period of unthinking extravagance 
is the best ultimate economy in the end. It 
teaches us that the things which, for the most 
part, are out of our reach, are not necessarily 
nicer because they are beyond our grasp, but in 
166 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 


reality are not nearly so pleasant in the long run 
as the things by which we really have to live. 

Nothing in the world of vice is so ugly that 
repression will not make it more so. 


167 


SOME CONFESSIONS 


The Danger of Carving Images 

W E like to pretend that we love people for 
the purity of their “ soul for the great¬ 
ness of their intellect; for the high moral 
motives which inspire their actions through life. 
But very often the truth is that we are drawn 
towards them more by their physical beauty, 
the straightness of their limbs, the clearness of 
their eyes, the way they smile at us, their fasci¬ 
nating mannerisms — a dozen purely outward 
charms that have nothing whatever to do with 
spiritual, moral, or intellectual altitude. 

And this is the reason of so many unaccount¬ 
able friendships, so many inexplicable love 
affairs, so many unreasonable likes and dislikes, 
the cause of so much extraordinary indifference. 
It is also the reason why absence does not make 
the heart grow fonder, contrary to all romantic 
pretence. It is the reason why two people, once 
deeply in love, become bored by each other — 
familiarity has bred staleness. The man who 
first carved out of wood and stone the image of 
his God risked a very great deal. It is far wiser 
168 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 


to leave an ideal disembodied. The man to 
whom a woman is most faithful, is the man she 
has never yet met. And the same axiom applies 
to men. 


169 


SOME CONFESSIONS 


The Long-ago of Yesterday 

VTOTHING seems quite so old-fashioned as 
^ the fashion which is just out-of-date. A 
“ hobble skirt,” or the point of view before 
August 1914, seems to speak of an age more 
distant than the crinoline or Solomon. So it is 
with our own life, with our own memories. As 
we look back down the long procession of dead 
years — our life seems as a tale that is told to us 
by some one else. We find it so hard to believe 
that we actually lived in those days which now 
seem such centuries ago; that the young man 
crooning poetry to the girl he loves was really 
us; that the timid fearful boy who dreamed 
away the hours pretending to work in an office, 
was somebody we once knew well, not actually 
the young man from whom we have ourselves 
evolved. Queen Elizabeth seems somehow 
nearer to us of the present day than King 
George IV or Queen Victoria. The days of our 
childhood; the days of our adolescence — they 
seem to speak of incidents analogous with An¬ 
cient Rome. Life seems very short — too short! 
170 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 


yet the “ romances ” of Yesterday seem aeons 
ago. Can they really have occurred to us? Or 
were they all part and parcel of a dream? To¬ 
day seems real enough. But even between our¬ 
selves and Yesterday there seems to have fallen 
a curtain, so that as we remember it — ourselves 
and Yesterday — it is as if we remembered 
something alien to our own experience. 


171 


SOME CONFESSIONS 


When we may proudly call Ourselves 
“ Charming 99 

rp HE discovery that we possess Charm is, as 
* it were, the birthday present which old 
Father Time presents to a man and a woman on 
their forty-fifth birthday. Many young people 
like to believe that they are charming, when, in 
reality, their attraction is merely the attraction 
of youth and health, of pretty ankles, a classical 
profile, or the elegant way in which fashionable 
clothes hang upon their “ fashionably shaped ” 
bodies. But nobody can with truth preen 
themselves on their charm until that allurement 
which belongs primarily to sex has waned, or 
become recognizably indistinct. If we are popu¬ 
lar at forty-five — then we must indeed possess 
an attractive personality. For to be really and 
truly charming must be for what we ARE , not 
for what we LOOK. Charm is surely a unique 
quality of the mind; otherwise, why not call it 
by its proper name — a name which infers some¬ 
thing entirely different from any mental or moral 
virtue, and is shared in by the animals also. 
172 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 


The Angry Art of Plain Speaking 

T WONDER why it is that people who love to 
* speak the truth, as the truth, they believe, 
has been revealed to them, always make it the 
excuse for being extremely rude? “ I am a blunt 
man,” they say, just as if a blunt man were any 
more desirable than a blunt knife! I suppose it 
is because the truth is generally spoken when 
the truth-sayer is in a temper. There is nothing 
like breakfast-time for the revelation of subcon¬ 
scious irritations. The downright person, the 
person who always says what he thinks and is 
never afraid to say it, is rarely so happy as when 
he comes right down on somebody’s pet corn. 
To some people corns are simply there to be 
stamped upon. And the more their victims yell, 
the louder they tell them that they shouldn’t 
have worn tight boots in the first instance. As 
if everybody had not their own little pet vanities, 
vanities which they have to pay dearly for, with¬ 
out other people sending in their own account 
rendered! But that is the worst of deliberate 
truth-tellers. They always carry out their con- 
173 


SOME CONFESSIONS 


victions as if they themselves were above re¬ 
proach. Personally, I don’t at all mind hearing 
the honest truth, providing I may be allowed to 
give utterance to my own ideas regarding it in 
return. But this is where the majority of people 
who pride themselves on never “ beating about 
the bush ” fail one. They hate their own 
“ bushes ” to be disturbed. But the only way to 
deal with people who will insist upon telling you 
what they think of you is to tell them what you 
think of them, in the first instance, if possible. 
It may mean a quarrel, or it may end in a life¬ 
long friendship, but, at any rate, you start the 
future from a common level, and to be on a com¬ 
mon level, and to know it, is the only way by 
which a man may help his brother man upward 
and be helped by him in return. But if there be 
any one quality necessary to reach this common 
starting-point, it is a sense of humour, without 
which no personal relationship which pretends to 
honesty can survive the first smart of plain 
speaking. For a sense of humour is so much 
more than its name implies. In many ways it is 
but another way of describing a sense of propor¬ 
tion, since real humour must see the funny side 
of every argument, and there is no subject on 
earth which cannot become ridiculous when faith 
174 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 


in it is driven to excess, and when it is treated 
as if it alone, in all heaven and earth, were the 
only thing that ever has, or ever will, really 
matter. 


175 


SOME CONFESSIONS 


The Extortionate Fees Demanded by 
Experience 

/^H, the utter uselessness of ever following 
other people’s advice! In this life, wherein 
there is so much pure chance, the worst advice 
at the moment may turn out the best advice in 
the long run. On the other hand, the best advice 
— which is usually along the “ safety line ” — 
may quite easily land one in a perfect maze of 
complications, besides adding to our loneliness 
and to our unseen tears. 

But, in any case, both good as well as bad 
advice is ours for nothing and at any time. 
People love to give advice — it makes them feel 
so superior, and is infinitely less fatiguing than 
sympathy. The great difficulty, however, is to 
follow any kind of advice which runs counter to 
our own desires. The amount of advice given 
and neglected every day, would tell a story of 
“ wastefulness ” of which the later history of the 
present Government’s economy (1922) would 
read like an essay on spendthrift extravagance. 
As a matter of fact, I believe that, among all the 
176 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 


people who ask advice — and some people are 
never tired of demanding it — comparatively 
few have any serious intention of following it, 
whatever it may be — especially should it run 
contrary to their own selfishness. When people 
ask advice, it is usually a desire to listen to an¬ 
other’s confirmation of their own decisions. 

Experience is perhaps the wisest counseller of 
all. Alas! that very often his fees are terribly 
extortionate. Moreover, you can rarely hand on 
the fruits of your own experience. Which, per¬ 
haps, is just as well, since the wisdom you have 
learned through bitter trials may quite easily 
prove foolishness when applied to the affairs of 
another. Some people can escape consequences 
so easily, and most people hope they will be 
counted among the lucky ones. So they go 
ahead — and trust to catch God napping. After 
all, we all have to make one big blunder; fools 
only repeat it. 


177 


SOME CONFESSIONS 


Our Self-worked Limelight 

“ QHOULD a woman tell?” I can remember 
^ there was a play which used to be per¬ 
formed on the music-halls bearing that title. 
If I remember rightly, the woman did tell — 
and there was a lot of trouble in consequence. 
Personally, I don’t see why any of us should say 
anything about our “ past.” Our “ past ” is our 
own affair. Only on one consideration should a 
woman, or for that matter a man, lay bare the 
innermost secrets of their dead yesterday — that 
is when there is a strong likelihood of the full 
story being revealed anyway. A trouble faced 
squarely is a trouble which can be conquered. It 
is only when we flee from the inevitable that it 
pursues us relentlessly, making us suffer the 
more acutely in direct ratio to our cowardice. 
But when there is no reasonable likelihood of the 
Dead Past being resurrected, I can see no earthly 
reason why anybody should deliberately raise it 
up to demand forgiveness for it. And demand 
forgiveness for it they always do — the men and 
women who will insist upon relating the full 
178 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 

story of their lives. That is, perhaps, why they 
like to tell it. I always think that a woman’s 
favourite Biblical picture is the one in which 
Mary Magdalene comes to Christ and is par¬ 
doned her past trespasses. Love is a strange 
mixture of ecstasy and sheer grovelling. And 
some only seem to find ecstasy when lying prone 
in the dust. They yearn to be loved for them¬ 
selves alone, not realizing that to be loved is to 
be worshipped as a symbol, not at all to be 
looked up to as an unadorned fact. So long as 
we can preserve that symbolism, just so long will 
we be loved. Most people prefer the Truth 
respectably dressed; seen naked, nine out of 
every ten blush at the sight and turn away. 
So it behoves a woman to keep the truth about 
herself well draped in metaphorical crepe-de¬ 
chine. After all, she won’t get the real unvar¬ 
nished truth, even though her lover does profess 
to tell her his life-story from beginning to end. 
It is human always, as it were, to smooth the 
edges and round the corners of our personal 
biography. And why not? In our private lives, 
what may look to another as an acute angle of 
wilful wickedness, may in reality have been such 
a gradual curve that we were round the bend 
long before we realized that our action did not 
179 


SOME CONFESSIONS 


lie along the straight, straight line. What is not 
known is always forgiven. So long as we do 
not forgive ourselves, we may count our past 
failings unto our soul as virtue, since by them 
it is cleansed and strengthened. But why, all 
the same, make a song about them? It is our 
own affair. No one, not even those who love 
us — perhaps those who love us least of all — 
has the right to demand explanations, or expect 
explanations concerning the present and the 
future. He who is jealous of “ yesterday ” will 
likely prove a most unstable companion to¬ 
morrow. 

And yet, there are lots of women who do not 
seem to be really content until they have con¬ 
fessed every single kiss they have ever received to 
the men they love, men who I am sure inwardly 
hate listening to their confession. They are 
always wanting to be “ converted ” through love, 
and have their sins washed away, if not in public, 
at least before some kind of an audience. It 
affords no satisfaction to a man to learn from 
the lips of the girl he adores that she has been as 
“ weak ” as he has. He wants to find his own 
salvation through his belief in her strength. 
When she won’t allow him to believe in her, he 
hates her, not for what she is, but for the 
180 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 


idol she has destroyed. Moreover, she also en¬ 
dangers her own salvation, since to know that 
some one we love believes in us is the finest 
incentive to become worthy of such a faith. 
We undermine so many things when once we 
seek to destroy the illusion which surrounds 
them. 


181 


SOME CONFESSIONS 


The Sailing of the “ Quest 99 

\ X THEN the Quest sailed, I wonder now many 
* * hearts went with it on its voyage towards 
the Unknown? I don’t mean with the crew, of 
course, but with the ship itself. So many of us 
are longing to “ get away.” Not many of us 
know quite where we want to go to, but we do 
yearn for fresh scenes, fresh faces; we do long to 
get right away from the weary turmoil which 
some call “ civilization we do long to begin 
all over again in some far-off land where there 
may be peace and where we like to believe that 
we will find happiness and rest. The “ daily 
round and common task ” — how “ common ” 
the task seems, and how tired we are of the 
continuity of the daily round! The War broke 
up our lives as well as our hearts, and in the 
Peace which followed there seems to be no 
peace, only more bickering, more jealousy and 
selfishness, more rumours of more wars and 
equal misery — though of a different kind — as 
when the War was in progress and the Armistice 
something too glorious and wonderful even to 
linger over in our day-dreams. Something seems 
182 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 


to have gone awry with the world of men, so that 
the only life worth living appears to be life on a 
desert island, where there is simply Nature and 
Silence, and where God, as in the Garden of 
Eden, will wander in the cool of the evening. 
And so when the Quest set sail, the hearts of 
many men went with it in imagination longingly, 
and thousands envied the crew — not so much 
the hardships which lay in front of them, but for 
the respite from those worries of modern life 
which seem to overwhelm more and more the 
happiness which should be ours. 

Strange it is how difficult happiness is to find! 
The animals find it quite easily. They only ask 
for food and liberty and a companion to share 
their wonder and their curiosity in the beauty 
and strangeness of the world around them. 
Personally, I don’t think that any of us are really 
happy until we are quite, quite simple. The 
simplest life is generally the happiest, and the 
simple pleasures are nearly always those pleas¬ 
ures the memory of which falls like a benediction 
on our troubled spirit. And yet, all of us seem to 
avoid simplicity as if it were a sign of failure, or 
something to be avoided with shame. We pre¬ 
tend to ourselves and to others far too much. 
Many of us are always pretending. We seem 
183 


SOME CONFESSIONS 


afraid of being natural, for fear that, being nat¬ 
ural, we shall not at the same time look dignified. 
As if a bolstered-up dignity impressed anyone 
except a fool! We seem incapable of finding 
happiness for ourselves, but must always strive 
to emulate the happiness of those whom we like 
to believe are more fortunate. And so, instead 
of enjoying every moment of life and health, we 
exist, for the most part, as if consciousness were 
not something splendid and wonderful, but 
merely a state to make the best of, a kind of dull 
stepping-stone towards that resplendent To¬ 
morrow of our hopes — which, oh, so rarely 
dawns! 

How often am I exasperated when I consider 
how much I have to earn, how many long hours 
I have to work, simply to keep a roof over my 
head and fill my body with food — most of 
which gives me indigestion! When my hours of 
play arrive, I am usually too weary to enjoy 
them. So I sink into a kind of dull lethargy, or 
go to a theatre, or play a game; do anything, in 
fact, merely to get away from myself. A far 
less luxurious roof, and infinitely less rich food, 
would still enable me to live in comfort; but 
were I to find them I should have to go and live 
in the depths of the country or in the slums, or, 
184 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 


what to me would be far worse, the suburbs. 
Incidentally, too, I should lose quite a number 
of friendly acquaintances, who would hate to 
share my simple repasts and shudder at my sur¬ 
roundings. So, like many other fools, I sacrifice 
too much of my life in order to exhibit a comfort 
which really brings me no pleasure commensu¬ 
rate with its expenses. And this expensive and 
generally tiresome artificiality blights nearly all 
the joy in life. We have grown to believe that 
Happiness is an expensive thing — something 
outside ourselves which has to be paid for. And 
the more expensive it is, the greater pleasure we 
are told it offers us. Only when it is too late; 
only when we have made for ourselves a rut, 
the walls of which are too high for any but the 
bravest to scale, do we realize in secret that 
Happiness lay, not in front of us, but around us 
all the time — among the simple and most 
human desired of our hearts. So when the Quest 
set sail, many of us longed to travel with her on 
the high seas. Something new; something 
strange; some perilous adventure — anything in 
fact, except this kind of batter-pudding-with- 
wearisome-sauce which, unconsciously maybe, 
we have allowed our over-vaunted civilization 
to make of our Little Day. 

185 


SOME CONFESSIONS 


Time-clipped Wings 

rpHE older we grow the easier we take root 
wherever we happen to be; not only that, 
but the easier we forge our own daisy-chains 
and imagine they are unbreakable ties. It mat¬ 
ters not that many of these roots and most of 
these chains are of the stuff of which procrastina¬ 
tion is made. Procrastination is often as irre¬ 
sistible as direct force, and much pleasanter to 
battle against. And there’s the rub! For, as we 
grow older, pleasant things, especially if they be 
at the same time peaceful, attract us more and 
more, until at last breakfast in bed (a thing I 
loathe, but no matter) lures us more effectively 
than any siren’s “ call ” from the distant hills. 
So our flights of fancy become at last merely 
dream voyages, the while our body is comfort¬ 
ably reclining in the easiest chair which it is our 
blessing to possess. It is not that most of us are 
unwilling; on the contrary, many of us live in 
full mental preparation to cast all aside and 
adventure into the Unknown. The trouble is 
that, as we grow older, our only activity is 
186 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 

mental — the body is always putting off until 
to-morrow what it is so disturbing to do to-day. 
Perhaps it is better so. Yet, all the same, the 
thought haunts us that, if this life of ours be all, 
we have done precious little with it; the world 
is wide, and we have only seen one little dusty 
corner; the earth is peopled by many interest¬ 
ing people, yet we have only collected around 
us a company of bores — more or less. “ We 
will away,” we say to ourselves, at the same 
time drawing up our easy chair nearer to the 
fireside. “ We will cast aside every tie that 
really is no tie at all, but merely a habit with a 
blue ribbon on it, and we will go out to seek the 
Adventure of Life!” And all the time we are, 
metaphorically speaking, scanning the clock, 
waiting for that moment when the maid will 
bring us our last hot whisky, without which we 
believe we could not possibly go to bed and 
dream — say of angels! The spirit is willing 
enough; it is the body which is such an uncon¬ 
scionable sluggard. Our hearts may still dream 
as they dreamed when we were twenty-one, but 
so many of us are fifteen at heart and fifty-five 
in the legs — and that is the great “ curse ” of 
growing old and sedate. Otherwise it has mani¬ 
fold advantages, not the least of which is no 
187 


SOME CONFESSIONS 


fearful hankering after life — just for the sake 
of living. 

If only we might be sentenced to death occa¬ 
sionally we really might then learn to enjoy 
ourselves — the sentence to be carried out unless 
we deliberately climbed out of our groove and 
set forth to reach some undiscovered country. 
The War blew most people’s “ banks ” sky high, 
and, looking back upon that period, after nearly 
four years of peace one is bound to confess 
that, not only was life much more like life should 
be then, but men and women were more like 
what men and women should be, too! With 
death so near at hand, there was no time left 
to make pretence any longer. We simply had 
to seize the moments, leaden or golden, which¬ 
ever they happened to be, and live them to their 
full. We lived for the most part as if there 
would likely be no to-morrow, and so we lived 
through to-day as ardently as we were able. 
We forgot such things as conventionality and 
“ the thing,” our snobbish ambitions, and the 
eternal struggle to make more and more money, 
simply because there was no time to remember 
them. We were forced to be real — one cannot 
be otherwise within the shadow of death —and 
because we became more real we were infinitely 
188 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 


more interesting, more natural, less encrusted 
by the sugar-coating of things-which-are-re- 
spectable-but-do-not-matter. And this is what 
we always do become when once we break away 
from the confines of that groove which uncon¬ 
sciously we make for ourselves. All the same, 
why I call it a “ groove ” I know not. It is far 
more like a pit when once you try to climb out 
of it. And unless something happens like a world 
war, few people ever do climb out at all. They 
are, in reality, dead and buried long before the 
earth at last covers their remains. And some¬ 
times they know it, and sometimes they do not. 
The tragic figures, however, are those who, 
knowing it, are too fearful to make an attempt. 
And how well I know that kind of fear. It has 
been my one great bugbear all my life through. 
Fear of what? I do not exactly know. Fear of 
to-morrow? Perhaps. How stupid! True! 
But what a very common failing, alas! 

How ceaselessly the Cosy and the Comfort- 
ably-off shake their heads at the inability of so 
many people to “ settle down ” since the War. 
They are full of forebodings regarding their 
future. They imply that this state of restless¬ 
ness is surely prompted by that little bit of the 
devil which is in all of us — that little bit of the 
189 


SOME CONFESSIONS 


devil which invariably tempts us to cock a snook 
at any angel from heaven the moment her back 
is turned. Personally, I have always a sneaking 
sympathy for those who cannot go back to the 
kind of life they lived before August, 1914. You 
can’t bring people suddenly face to face with the 
profundities of existence and then expect them 
to find satisfaction in its tawdry artificialities. 
You cannot willingly stand on a mountain-top 
and then descend to snuggle dully within some 
stuffy little niche. Having lived life vitally for 
a time, it is difficult to return to the stiff white 
collar of conventional existence and become a 
hard-working, respectable business automaton. 
The War shattered every kind of “ pretence,” 
and it is well-nigh impossible to go on pretending 
when once you have perceived its absurdity. 
Life is too short, and so the effort does not seem 
worth while. But that perhaps is why — 
essential to your own salvation though it be — 
it is dangerous for most men and women to 
escape the groove. They can never return. 


190 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 


Carnival 

T^OR some years past there have been efforts 
—entirely vain, for the most part — to 
introduce the continental carnival into England. 
One might just as well try to introduce Punch 
and Judy into the Church Congress. The earn¬ 
est churchman could not possibly view such an 
introduction with greater hostility than did the 
“ respectable ” inhabitants of those seaside re¬ 
sorts where the Carnival was organized in the 
belief that it would amuse and entertain the 
visitors and residents. True, the inhabitants 
hung out a few flags, and the shop-windows dis¬ 
played bags of confetti, paper roses and sundry 
grotesque masks: but underneath this faint dis¬ 
play of universal conviviality, there surged a 
spirit of resentment. Such a thing as a carnival 
was considered to be alien to the British way of 
enjoying itself. We may not be professing 
Puritans in these days, but a nation can’t go 
through some centuries of Puritanism without 
austerity entering into its soul, freezing the 
spontaneity of its natural frivolity. The only 
191 


SOME CONFESSIONS 

means by which the average Englishman can be 
made to forget his own decorum is to become 
half-drunk. In fact, the English carnivals that I 
have visited were perfectly symbolized in the 
figures of middle-aged men, in an advanced stage 
of intoxication, wearing paper caps. They were 
invariably the centre of an unflattering attention 
— except from small boys. Yet they were the 
nearest approach to the carnival spirit anywhere 
around. For the rest, its main interest lay in 
the fact that the small children of the poor 
streets anticipated Guy Fawkes Day by decking 
themselves up in paper streamers and penny 
masks, demanding the passers-by to “ spare a 
copper ” — which, in parenthesis, most of them 
gave them, since it is a curious fact about 
passers-by that they will always find a penny for 
a child and pass by the blind and the maimed 
and the halt without so much as a look. Beyond 
the children hardly anybody seemed to be enjoy¬ 
ing himself who was, at the same time, sober. 
A furtive, hang-dog kind of air seemed to per¬ 
vade the crowd. It was as if it had been asked 
to be “ naughty ” and had not found it very 
“ nice,” contrary to all expectation. The few 
who seemed determined to enjoy themselves 
somehow and at all costs, were simply noisy and 
192 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 


not in the least an embodiment of the joie de 
vivre. The majority viewed their exhibition of 
horseplay with curiosity mingled with contempt. 
They looked as if such antics were a kind of slur 
upon their own habitual conduct: their expres¬ 
sion was of one whose inner yearning is to go 
quietly home and let who will be giddy. I 
know not which was more depressing — the 
revellers or the revilers. It was as gay as a 
mock funeral without a corpse. 

What the organizers of these carnivals seemed 
to have forgotten was the fact that you can no 
more transplant a nation’s amusements success¬ 
fully than you can transplant a nation’s national 
heroes. They lose all character, all their signifi¬ 
cance when transferred to alien soil. Each 
nation enjoys itself in its own way. A mutual 
appreciation of such enjoyments among them¬ 
selves is as impossible to discover as a mutual 
appreciation of their individual senses of 
humour. The spirit of Carnival will never be a 
popular spirit in England, for the simple reason 
that the average Englishman observes strictly 
only two Commandments—the Eleventh, which 
we all know, and the Twelfth which runs: 
“ Thou shalt not appear ridiculous in the eyes of 
thy neighbour.” Only when he is intoxicated 
193 


SOME CONFESSIONS 

can an Englishman so far forget himself as to 
ignore that latter injunction. He is too self- 
conscious to be a daylight reveller. The old 
puritanical outlook still keeps watch over his 
actions, paralysing their exuberance. He cannot 
outgrow that ancient belief which considered 
every sign of wild enjoyment to be instigated by 
the Evil One. And, in his case, it very often is. 
For, as a rule, there is nothing quite so coarse, 
quite so unattractive, as the average Englishman 
striving to amuse himself in a continental 
fashion. Where a Southerner can be witty and 
child-like in his inconsequential happiness, an 
Englishman is only obscene and “ monkeyish.’’ 
He is as unpleasing as every one is who is living 
totally outside his own element. In his proper 
sphere, however, he enjoys himself quite as much 
as any other man. His amusements are different 
— that is all. Such things as the “ crowning of 
King Carnival,” “ beauty competitions,” parades 
of mannequins in bathing costumes, battles of 
flowers, are not for him. He will go to see them, 
but his inner criticism is shown by the secret 
contempt he feels for those who willingly enter 
into them. He would far sooner see a county 
football match or watch a real king pass, or see 
a parade of boxers, or have a good fight on his 
194 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 


own account in a side street with his enemy. 
And his womenfolk are much the same — though 
an Englishwoman can more easily enter into 
the atmosphere of revelry, since her spirits are 
buoyed up to the necessary pitch by the fact 
that, in fancy dress, she is probably looking very 
pretty. An Englishman in fancy dress always 
feels himself an “ ass,” and is made the more 
uncomfortable by the fact that he feels he also 
ought to be “ gay ” and “ wicked.” He can, 
of course, be both; but his greatest difficulty 
is to combine them successfully, to all outside 
appearances, without being drunk. 

Foreigners, when they visit England, think 
we are, as a nation, depressed and serious, be¬ 
cause we do not enjoy ourselves in their way. 
Watch a football crowd, and, except for the wild 
outburst of cheering on occasion, it is the most 
deadly assembly of depressing exteriors imagi¬ 
nable. But though there is no laughter, and 
but a few coarse jests, every one in the crowd is 
intensely happy. If you gave it bags of paper 
flowers and paper caps and told it to throw the 
one and don the other it would do so, but in a 
far less contented state of mind. There is 
dignity in sport, but there is no dignity in child¬ 
ishness — at least, if there is, the average Eng- 
195 


SOME CONFESSIONS 

lishman fails to see it. The old spirit of Puritan¬ 
ism is ineradicable, or maybe it is simply our 
climate. In either case, the fact remains that, 
deep down in the Englishman’s heart, there lurks 
the belief that anything appertaining to the 
spirit of Carnival is a direct encouragement to 
sin, and that though the directors of it may be 
the Mayor and Corporation, the Devil is never¬ 
theless sitting with them at the board of council. 
Alcohol alone can deaden his self-questioning. 
That is why the introduction of anything 
approaching the continental forms of gaiety 
quickly degenerates into horse-play and licence 
on this side of the Channel. The average Lon¬ 
don Night Club is among the most depressing 
things I know. An English prostitute is usually 
a dull and tragic figure. To watch the average 
Englishman dance is to regard an almost solemn 
ecstasy. Give him, however, some duty to per¬ 
form, and he will perform it hilariously. The 
Great War was the nearest approach to a conti¬ 
nental carnival that the present generation is 
ever likely to see in England. A state funeral is 
an anticipated event. It is hopeless to fashion 
the amusements of English people to any stand¬ 
ards but their own. They do enjoy themselves 
as much as any other nation, but their enjoy- 
196 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 


ment is not infectious. The Englishman regards 
his pastimes as seriously as he guards his home. 
He cannot mingle gracefully with his fellow-men 
in any circumstances which seem at war with his 
dignity. His ways are his own ways — and they 
are consequently the best ways for him. Let 
other nations pretend to fulfil the Ten Com¬ 
mandments — an Englishman reserves his prac¬ 
tical devotion only to the Eleventh and 
Twelfth— 

“ Thou shalt not be found out.” 

“ Thou shalt not appear ridiculous in the eyes 
of thy neighbour.” 

Fulfilling these two, he can enjoy himself 
enormously. Ask him to ignore them — he will 
obey in shame or in drink. It is a waste of en¬ 
thusiasm to expect him to disobey them other¬ 
wise. He is an Englishman. He knows exactly 
what he likes. Only in an atmosphere of impend¬ 
ing danger is he whole-heartedly jocose. 


197 


The “ Pompous 99 and the “ Mere 99 


OU jeer, perhaps, at pomposity. I envy 



A it. I don’t want to be pompous all the 
time, but to be pompous on occasion is a most 
valuable asset to possess. “ Pomposity ” signi¬ 
fies success. It is all very well to be modest and 
humble and inherit all those other peaceful vir¬ 
tues which people habitually tread on, but a 
little “ pomposity ” goes a long way in the esti¬ 
mation of many people — not the people who 
count, perhaps, but the people who make up a 
crowd and seem to achieve no other individual 
destiny. “Pomp and circumstance ” — the ma¬ 
jority of men adore them! They may pretend 
to laugh at them, but their applause gives the lie 
direct to their sense of humour. Politicians 
know that. It is the reason why eloquence and 
a good platform presence can successfully hide 
so much sly cunning. Kings know it too; and so 
do Statesmen; so even do Communists when 
they unfurl their red flag and scream “ liberty ”! 
“ Pomposity ” is the kind of gilded symbol of 
achievement, and can hide the truth when there 


198 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 


has been no real achievement whatsoever. A 
“ commanding figure ” uttering “ bosh ” how 
readily we are all inclined to cheer him to the 
echo, while we ignore the worm-like creature 
who is speaking common sense. We all like to 
imagine ourselves members of some grand pro¬ 
cession, and if we can’t be in it, the next best 
thing is to watch it. But a procession is nearly 
always a “ goose-step ” — that is, it looks so im¬ 
pressive, but nobody quite knows why it should 
march thus, waving banners and following any¬ 
thing from a golden casket to a human being 
dressed up to look like a figure in a transforma¬ 
tion scene. It would seem as if we must always 
dress our faith up and present it with a golden 
crown and a magic wand. Disguised to look all- 
powerful, we are quite content ourselves to 
resemble something all-doormat. We profess 
not to worship idols, but few of us are content 
until we have made for ourselves something 
extraordinarily like a graven image. We do not 
realize until much later that most symbols rep¬ 
resent dead ideals. 

Even in our intimacies we like our friends to 
look important — though maybe they are of not 
the slightest consequence to the common weal. 
Clothes were evolved, I believe, in order that 
199 


SOME CONFESSIONS 

many of us might look more impressive than 
we naturally are. The more solemn the occasion 
the more solemn becomes our garb. At the 
Day of Judgment many men will be apologetic 
for not appearing in a top-hat. We like to show 
our “ gala ” spirit by putting on black ties, or, 
if we are female, reduce our dress to a minimum 
during some of the chilliest hours of the twenty- 
four. A woman with a diamond necklace secretly 
pities the other woman who can only tie a velvet 
ribbon round her neck. The be-diamonded 
woman has realized the advantage of being 
pompous. For “ pomposity,” I take it, is that 
“ dramatic effect ” which prevents the mind 
realizing that there is no real drama. As Mr. 
Fes ting Jones says in his delightful book 
“ Mount Eryx,” it is our “ Poesia,” our con¬ 
scious or unconscious elaboration of the Real in 
the hope that some one may mistake it for the 
miraculous. We cannot stick to the Naked 
Truth about ourselves. We must always hanker 
after having a fig-leaf designed by Reville and 
Rossiter. If we represent an Ideal, we instinc¬ 
tively strive to represent it in our appearance — 
as near to some deity recently descended from 
Olympus as we are able. It is, of course, very 
amusing to watch, but it makes progress often 
200 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 

rather tiring, since “ pomposity ” is offended if it 
be not treated pompously. And there’s the rub. 
For so much valuable time is wasted on the 
etiquette of approach that the real work in 
hand often becomes a pleasant phantom seen 
from afar off. The “ dignity of our position ” 
— how often we forget to analyse our position 
in the effort to keep up our dignity. And, 
laughable though it be often, impressiveness 
can sometimes carry off an uncertain situation. 
That is why I envy it — even though it often 
makes me smile. People are disappointed if 
the object they admire falls short of the ideal it 
represents. The world pretends to despise cere¬ 
mony, but in reality it adores it. The “ voice 
crying in the wilderness ” might just as well 
remain mute. What we really like, what really 
stirs our very “ soul,” is a man screaming 
through a megaphone in the Albert Hall, with 
lots of people in their best clothes sitting on the 
platform, a limelight thrown on the speaker as if 
it were a direct ray from Heaven, and front seats 
round about four guineas apiece. What is said 
doesn’t matter. We have had a thrilling evening. 
Everybody looked their part to perfection. 
That is all that matters! And yet one hears and 
reads a great deal about the glory of being suc- 
201 


SOME CONFESSIONS 


cessful, rich, powerful and lovely; but very little 
about the utter peacefulness of being “ mere.” 
And yet the inner satisfaction of being merely 
“ mere ” is very great when you sit down to 
seriously consider its many blessings. To be 
“ mere ” carries with it no responsibility, and 
that in itself is an enormous benefit. Nobody 
asks of the merely mere people to be anything 
except what they are not. But to be rich and 
successful, powerful and lovely, puts one on a 
pedestal above the crowd, and to be on a pedes¬ 
tal is to provide an admirable target, while 
“ target,” in parentheses, is an admirable symbol 
of the situation of those who stand out from the 
common ruck. And the worst of being on a 
pedestal is that you’ve got to stop there all the 
time for your own safety. The eyes of the mul¬ 
titude are upon you, and you can never get away 
from them for a moment. Your only chance 
then of gaining the restfulness of a lower level is 
to do something disgraceful, when you not only 
descend, but you are trampled under foot into 
the mud. This never happens to the “ mere ” 
man. He can go on his way rejoicing, undis¬ 
turbed by any outside attention, whether it be 
praise, blame or merely acidulated burlesque. 
Nobody takes any interest in him whatsoever. 

202 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 


Thus he knows the blessed situation of complete 
anonymity — or as near to anonymity as anyone 
can get in this world where most men have one eye 
on the main chance and the other on their neigh¬ 
bours. Moreover, mediocrity is much less lonely 
than greatness. A great man is usually the more 
alone because so many people are buzzing 
around him, trying to share in the rewards of his 
greatness; his entourage is too often composed 
entirely of flatterers on the one hand, and bitter 
enemies on the other — a distressing combina¬ 
tion at any time. But the mediocre man can 
pick and choose his friends among other medi¬ 
ocre men, happy in the knowledge that he will be 
asked to bolster up no losing cause, nor have his 
private life pried into for the relaxation of the 
reading public. He just passes on his way from 
one milestone of life to another — ignored, and 
if he be wise, ignoring. 

And believe me, it is easier to assume a kind 
of imitation greatness than it is to resign your¬ 
self happily to being actually “ mere.” Most 
people lose half the happiness which could be 
theirs, in their efforts to obtain something which 
lies beyond their reach. Ambition, power, suc¬ 
cess, beauty, carry with them — if I may so 
express it — their own special concentrated dose 
203 


SOME CONFESSIONS 

of salts of lemon. Very few of the great ones of 
this earth look happy. Have you noticed that? 
They have a reputation to keep up — and that 
always means a miserable effort. Their great¬ 
ness leaves them no peace. They are always 
either spurring themselves onward toward a 
higher elevation, or fighting those below them to 
keep the footing they have already obtained. 
Thank goodness! no one can push anybody off 
the lowest level. It is his “ for keeps ” — unless 
he is foolish enough to attempt to “ go up 
higher.” You may find contentment on the 
level, whereas there is no such thing as peace on 
a pedestal. Moreover, a man on the level can 
wander where he wishes, and nobody, having 
noticed him, desires to say him nay. But there 
is no such thing as anonymity in greatness. 
Even though it is clever enough to lead a 
“ double life,” be sure its biographer will one 
day find it out. No, we usually suffer far more 
from our “ outstanding qualities ” than from 
those commonplace virtues at which nobody 
throws either a bouquet or a brick-bat. So 
loudly and so long have power and success, 
beauty and wealth, been dinned into us as bless¬ 
ings after which all should strive, that medioc¬ 
rity shuffles along with its coat collar turned up, 
204 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 

and its chin deeply buried within its folds. And 
yet, without mediocrity there could be no such 
thing as super-humanity. In a world entirely 
composed of supermen there would be no raison 
d'etre for anybody to strive at all. A handful of 
suet is a nasty thing, but you can’t make a plum 
pudding without it; and although, still to keep 
within a culinary metaphor, the currants may 
“ fancy themselves,” a cake made entirely of 
currents would be a horrible compound to digest. 
So let us keep some Songs of Praise for the 
Commonplace and Ordinary. They may not 
inherit the fairy palaces of this earth, but they 
do pay the majority of the taxes. And a special 
paean should be sung for those who, being both 
commonplace and ordinary, make no dreary 
attempts to be otherwise. 


205 


SOME CONFESSIONS 


On Hostesses who lose Touch with their 
Own Parties 

QO many hostesses give entertainments at 
^ which they could not possibly be expected 
to enjoy themselves. The result is failure almost 
invariably. And these hostesses are left wonder¬ 
ing whatever went wrong with their good inten¬ 
tions, and why they are thankful when they are 
over, and what gives them that haunting feeling 
that their guests were also filled by the self-same 
satisfaction. Personally, I always take it as an 
axiom that if you don’t enjoy your own 
“ parties ” none of your guests ever will. The 
sight of a strained and anxious hostess is like the 
breath of cold air on an omelette — the only 
quality which makes it delicious has vanished. 
Of course, I realize that there are two kinds of 
social entertainments. There are those which 
are arranged purely and solely so that the 
hostess and her guests may enjoy themselves; 
there are those which, to put it metaphorically, 
are merely designed to wipe off old debts in one. 
These, of course, are not, strictly speaking, en¬ 
tertainments at all, but merely “ receipts ” or 
even “accounts rendered,” and you file them in 
206 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 


your memory with all the other dull things you 
can think of. But the hostess who has really 
discovered her true genre is a rare bird. So 
many women seem ambitious to entertain be¬ 
yond their means — I don’t mean financially, so 
much as intellectually. They lose hold of their 
own position as hostess, and either become mere 
figure-heads at the top of a staircase or else the 
centre of a small crowded corner with every one 
else looking for them in vain. The hostess 
who loses touch with her own party is the hostess 
who gives among the dullest in the social round. 
And how many such there are! They begin 
admirably and afterwards spend the rest of the 
time frantically trying to connect loose ends. 
They are unhappy themselves, and they spread 
their own perturbation among their guests. The 
result is that their dinner-parties degenerate into 
something approaching the dullness of semi¬ 
public affairs; their luncheon-parties equally 
as un-intimate; even their tea-parties are less 
restful than one partaken in a city cafe. Their 
own strained efforts inflict their guests with the 
same longing for escape as does a long railway 
journey along with some one whose only friendly 
link is that he “ knew your mother when she 
was a young girl.” 


207 


SOME CONFESSIONS 

I suppose the real reason why so many of us 
echo whole-heartedly the remark of the French 
philosopher who said “ Life might be enjoyable 
if it were not for its pleasures ” is that few of us 
make sufficiently determined efforts not to know 
the wrong people. We are all so ready to know 
anybody; but the worst of getting to know 
people is that one has got to keep on knowing 
them, or turn them into enemies more or less. 
Some, the more misguided ones it seems to me, 
are only content when they have the reputation 
for knowing everybody. But the person who 
knows everybody is generally the one whom it is 
no gratification to get to know. They collect 
names as some people collect stamps, and when 
they entertain, it is as if they sent invitations 
to view an exhibit. But if there is anything 
more boring than a visit to an exhibition, I 
should not like to go. Nevertheless, there are 
certain hostesses who seem born with a gift of 
organizing crowds. They marshal their guests 
like a regiment. They shine the most resplen¬ 
dent in the center of a surging mass. But these 
women are not really hostesses. They are 
directors of massed forces. The born hostess is 
she who can envelop her guests in her own per¬ 
sonality, in her own happiness, her own point of 
208 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 


view. Because she, herself, is happy among her 
friends, her friends are happy to be with her. It 
is a social gift, moreover, which can be cultivated 
in both rich and poor alike. And it is a very 
precious and a very enviable gift, too. Not 
sufficient due is ever given to those who radiate 
the happiness of their own friendly feelings. 
But unless a hostess can radiate her own friendli¬ 
ness among her guests, her entertainments are 
never really successful. It is popularly supposed 
that the host is the last person who should expect 
to enjoy his own parties. But, if he doesn’t, 
be sure nobody else will. So the wise host only 
gives those entertainments which he really 
enjoys himself. And in enjoying them he will, 
all unconsciously perhaps, make them enjoyable. 
That is why the “ passing of the great Edward¬ 
ian hostesses ” — so poignant a regret in books 
of middle-aged memoirs — leaves the modern 
generation quite chilly. The modern hostess 
only asks her guests to do what they like, while 
she does what she likes. And where people are 
doing what they like, they, of course, like what 
they do. So the result is a reputation for enter¬ 
taining which no retreat of beauty or advance of 
fat can destroy. 


209 


SOME CONFESSIONS 


On Getting into Society 

T T was, I think, John Oliver Hobbes who said 
* that “ People spend half their lives trying 
to get into society and the rest of the time in 
trying to get out of it.” Personally, I loathe all 
society, whether it is spelt with a big capital 
S or a quite teeny-weeny one. But then, I’m 
afraid I have misanthropic tendencies, and so 
am no judge of the satisfaction of knowing a 
lot of people, few of whom have any over¬ 
whelming desire to know me. Yet I have talked 
to many people whose acknowledged ambition 
it has been to be considered members of Society 
— with a gigantic S — and I have found them 
a very weary, disillusioned brigade. Most of 
them seem to have achieved their ambition, only 
to discover that it meant merely to be bored on 
a grand scale. The others found a never ending 
satisfaction in being bracketed with the Best 
People — even though the Best People only con¬ 
descended to recognize that “ bracket ” on a 
purely take-without-giving basis, i.e. in exchange 
for lavish entertainments, or any other rare and 
210 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 

particular advantage that might be offered to 
them. Nevertheless, I am always wondering 
wherein lies the satisfaction of struggling to get 
to know people who have not the least desire to 
know you! I suppose it belongs to that “ kink ” 
in human nature which, when it finds a locked 
door, immediately imagines that what lies on the 
other side must necessarily be far more wonder¬ 
ful than what lies on this. They are the things 
that we do not possess which seem to us to be the 
very things we want the most. And so it is with 
society. Those who are “ out of it ” want to 
get in it, and those who are in it are mostly 
bored to death with their position. Perhaps the 
happiest are those who, after long struggling and 
much expense, eventually buy themselves a posi¬ 
tion “ on the fringe.” People who live “ on the 
fringe ” are always buoyed up by hope. For 
example, those who live in Mayfair are usually 
far less insistent on having that locality on their 
note-paper than those who, merely living in 
the cleaner parts of Pimlico, insist upon calling 
it “ Lower Belgravia.” (This, of course, does 
not apply to Park Lane, since Park Lane is 
always socially suspect; so many of its denizens 
— dowager-countesses and courtesans — are 
here to-day gloriously, and may be anywhere 
211 


SOME CONFESSIONS 


to-morrow. They are just Bayswater with its 
“ ship ” come in.) 

And yet, I sometimes ask myself if social 
climbers may not be quite modest people after 
all. There can be no pride in grovelling, and the 
yearning to know people who show no interest in 
knowing you belongs to a less egotistical spirit 
than the one which refuses to be known by any¬ 
body save those whom it particularly desires to 
know. The dog, for instance, wags its tail to 
obtain your kind attention — but no one could 
call the dog a “ snob.” The real “ snob ” rather 
is the cat, who will condescend to be stroked 
when it feels inclined and ignores you utterly 
when it is in no purring mood. So these social 
climbers wag their tails, and bring myrrh and 
incense in the hope that those whose smiles they 
covet may permit them to lick their boots in 
public. But the real “ snob ” is surely he who 
believes he is conferring a favour when he allows 
his boots to be licked! The “ lickers ” them¬ 
selves belong rather to the great “ lackey ” 
family of the world — whose ambition is to 
serve. After all, let every man and woman have 
their own ambitions, and, if that ambition is to 
get to know the “ best people ” — well, their 
efforts all add to the farcical element of life. No 
212 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 

one is really impressed by their successes — but 
their antics do very often make us laugh, and, 
personally, I am ready to forgive anybody any¬ 
thing provided that they add to my entertain¬ 
ment. So perhaps the greatest “ snob ” of all is 
he who picks and chooses his own society — 
welcoming into the social circle of which he, 
himself, is the centre, everybody who adds to his 
enjoyment, and cold-shouldering literally nobody 
except those belonging to the monstrous army of 
bores. Merely to get to know people in a better 
social “ set ” than your own may be a puerile 
ambition, but it is essentially harmless. It is 
puerile because, when they arrive there, they 
receive no additional intellectual or moral or any 
other satisfaction. The same percentage of 
bores is to be found in every class of society. 
At best their triumph consists in being able to 
flaunt their “ visiting list ” in the faces of those 
whose friends, on paper, appear infinitely less 
imposing. It is not, of course, a laudable pro¬ 
ceeding — because so silly. It resembles the 
action of a cook who flourishes her new hat in 
the face of the scullery-maid. The cook, by her 
action, shows that, in spite of her new hat, she 
is really in heart and “ soul ” entirely of the 
“ kitchen so the social climber proves by his 
213 


SOME CONFESSIONS 


climbing that, in reality, he is only a consummate 
bore, forcing his way into places where he is not 
especially wanted — the surest sign of a bore 
among all the many signs they give uncon¬ 
sciously. After all, if the “ climbers ” were 
clever, or amusing, or had something really per¬ 
sonal and valuable to offer, society would be only 
too pleased to know them. So perhaps when 
we meet a social climber we ought not to con¬ 
demn him, but rather hold him up as an example 
of such modesty that he resembles nothing so 
much as a begger while waiting for the crumbs 
to fall from the tables of the more fortunate. 
There is real pathos in the eyes of those who, at 
Ascot, only gaze discontentedly, like Moses, into 
the Promised Land — otherwise the royal 
enclosure. 


214 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 


Those Whom We Forgive 

TN spite of what those novelists say, who write 
* gaudily-covered stories of “ pink ” passion 
for “ pale spinsters,” the Scarlet Sinner in sack¬ 
cloth and ashes is far more appealing than she 
who glories in being worse than she is painted 
and lives, as it were, a gay life of one “ big 
damn ” after another and in the face of all the 
angels. Messalina, all bounce and bravado, may 
seem to cut a very striking figure, but she is 
really an unmitigated bore, unless you happen to 
be a victim of her allure, in comparison with 
Magdalen “ on the rocks ” all tears and tatters, 
whose child is both a proof of her sin as well as 
a begging of our pardon. The fact is that Venus, 
who has just had her hair Marcel-waved, doesn’t 
need anybody’s pity, nor anybody’s forgiveness. 
It is only when she returns in poverty and dis¬ 
tress that the moral world secretly welcomes her, 
since surely she is as she has become, simply to 
teach a lesson —and the most popular moral 
warnings of all are those which are illustrated 
by other people. 


215 


SOME CONFESSIONS 

I don’t know exactly why the signs of repent¬ 
ance should be a body clothed in sackcloth and 
ashes — but that is by the way. It is no use 
illustrating it in Russian sables and “ cultured ” 
pearls; thus garbed, it is more like an example to 
be lived up to. Unless the sinner’s bosom is 
heaving convulsively and, from the point of view 
of la mode, she is looking a “ perfect sight,” 
neither the reading world, nor the dramatic 
world, has really the slightest interest in her 
protestations of reform. We describe her as 
“ hard and unsympathetic,” and unless her gay 
life is brought to a summary and sudden close 
before the end of the last chapter, or the end of 
the last act, we feel that morality has been de¬ 
frauded of its rightful due, and, being ourselves 
examples of that “ due,” we close the book, or 
leave the theatre, with the feeling that the 
denouement was unsatisfactory and the end un¬ 
finished. Magda in her frills and furbelows, her 
“ grand airs,” and her expensive hats, left us 
admiring, but emotionally cold; whereas, when 
she staggered out of the room to the accompani¬ 
ment of parental curses, it would seem that she 
had been beaten, and in her discomfiture had 
come to us for pity — we, the strict upholders of 
morality in drama and in fiction, as well as in 
216 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 


real life. Poor and piteous, she is, as it were, in 
our power. We feel that, were we able to accord 
her an invitation, she would be thankful for us to 
invite her out to tea. Her misery makes us feel 
superior — and superiority, though it may sound 
cynical to say so, is seven-tenths of being kind. 
To see beauty and badness in humiliation at our 
feet flatters the inhabitants of a world wherein 
the majority are only half moral, and quite dis¬ 
tinctly plain. 

But Bold Bad Beauty must not seek our pro¬ 
tection until she is quite, quite old. We never 
truthfully believe the protestations of youth 
and loveliness while they are young and lovely. 
But, once let the sinner be without defences, 
and we are ready to accord her the benefit of 
present doubts — since to whatever heights she 
may henceforth soar on repentance and “ good 
deeds,” we realize she will forever be immeasur¬ 
ably behind us. So, as I said before, we are 
not really interested in the Scarlet Woman until 
time has faded her colouring and taken the 
starch out of her pride. 

Therefore the writer who makes his heroine 
not only bad, but prosperous, may afford the 
illustrator of the outside cover plenty of scope 
for a design in the primitive colours, but unless 
217 


SOME CONFESSIONS 


he brings her to a bad end at last, he has alien¬ 
ated the sympathies of his readers for all time. 
It says much for human nature that it is always 
ready to forgive a Loser, whereas a Winner 
only receives the most hypocritical congratula¬ 
tions. For the one who has lost is worse off than 
we are ourselves, who have never risked; and to 
those worse off than ourselves we may forgive 
much. It is only those who have risked and won 
who get the moral brickbats hurled at them — 
since they are the only things left for us to hurl. 
But the one person we pursue relentlessly is he, 
or she, who, though unfortunate, does not seek 
either our pity or listen to our precepts. The 
person who stands aloof from us — that is the 
person whom we never really forgive. That is 
why we never condone a young man’s determina¬ 
tion to “ live his own life.” It would seem that 
his self-determination ignored us completely — 
and how we hate to be ignored! We manage to 
forgive every sinner his sin so long as he throws 
himself upon our mercy, which is only human 
after all. It is this pleasure of being able to feel 
superior in some way, which, as it were, makes a 
show of Christian virtue so often merely a preen¬ 
ing of the Christian feathers. 


218 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 


The Virtue of an Unflattering Mirror 

T REMEMBER once talking to a well-known 
* actress who possessed her own theatre, built 
after her own design. In a room leading out of 
her dressing-room she had installed an enormous 
mirror, covering completely one of the walls, 
and so lit up from above and below that, gazing 
into it, she could see exactly how she would 
presently appear on the stage before the public 
whom she knew were there, not only to criticize 
her acting, but also to pick all possible holes in 
her far-famed beauty. It struck me as an excel¬ 
lent idea, and one which might well be copied by 
nearly every woman in her latter thirties and 
early forties. It would, to give one example, 
save many a woman from appearing in pink — 
that most outrageously treacherous of all colours 
to a woman no longer in her first bloom of youth. 
It would prevent her from imagining, also to 
her own undoing, that how she looks in her 
mirror, in a room softly shaded by curtains, she 
will presently appear in that broad light of day 
— which, like a coarse joke, is so uncompromis- 
219 


SOME CONFESSIONS 


ingly broad. Mirrors are lying jades, even those 
which seem to do their best to make even Venus 
herself look plain. There is no looking-glass 
which, if you gaze into it long enough, and 
especially often enough, will not satisfy you at 
last by the comforting notion, that, if you don’t 
happen to be beautiful, you don’t look so bad, 
and, at any rate, infinitely more pleasing than 
the majority. Of course, I don’t know whether 
it be the fault, or the virtue, of the looking-glass, 
or whether it belongs to that plain woman’s com¬ 
fort — the truth that a familiar face soon loses 
all ugliness in the eyes of its beholder. It is true 
that we never see ourselves as other people see 
us, and this for the simple reason that we can 
never see ourselves for the first time. It is the 
first look which counts for beauty and the hun¬ 
dredth for love. But so many women would 
seem to be more pleased by being admired than 
by being loved for what they are, or don’t happen 
to be. That is why they will “ dress up ” for a 
comparative stranger, and put on most any old 
thing for a husband. And strangely enough, too, 
they are not half so furious with the stranger if 
he doesn’t happen to fall down in worship as 
they are with the husband who ceases to love 
them! 


220 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 

Perhaps the wise woman is she who not only 
changes her mirror often, but changes its posi¬ 
tion frequently. It is human nature, I suppose, 
to pull down the metaphorical blind, gaze at 
oneself in the looking-glass, and rejoice exceed¬ 
ingly that at forty we don’t look a day over 
twent}f-nine. And yet, maybe, there is also 
real wisdom in this, our desire for the flattering 
illusion. A woman who is under the impression 
that she is looking her best, will be at her best. 
Perhaps, deep down in her subconscious self, 
she realizes that personality is nine-tenths of 
beauty, and an admirer and a lover are both 
simply two men she has successfully mesmerized. 
But you can’t mesmerize until you feel that you 
possess personal power over your victim — 
and a large percentage of the power of person¬ 
ality springs from a feeling of security and an 
inner sense of self-satisfaction. Thus a woman 
satisfied by herself will at the same time satisfy 
others — a victory which her more retiring, self- 
depreciating, and timid sister will only attain 
“ once in a blue moon ” — and then, for the 
most part, too late! Thus, if you watch women, 
you will observe that, whereas a hundred will 
stop to look at themselves in a mirror hung in a 
becomingly shaded room, scarcely two out of a 
221 


SOME CONFESSIONS 


thousand will rearrange their hat before one of 
those looking-glasses hanging outside shops, 
whose relentless honesty is invariably sufficient 
to scare the most beautiful woman in the world 
back into her beauty parlour. And yet, the out¬ 
side mirrors tell us exactly how we look to those 
outside. So why should we avoid them as if they 
were an accident in the street? After all, com¬ 
mon sense tells us that we should dress up to 
modify the worst, rather than issue forth as if 
the sun itself were hidden behind a rose-pink 
shade. But, as I wrote before, we should then 
feel that we were looking our worst, and in feel¬ 
ing thus, would tend to live down to it at the 
same time. Besides, what are “ looks ” so long 
as they don’t absolutely “ jar ”? Most bores 
are beautiful, or rather, most beautiful women 
are bores, because they are so supremely content 
to offer the world nothing but their beauty. 
But, as a matter of fact, nothing so easily palls 
as a beautiful face in the eyes of those who be¬ 
hold its beauty every day. It is the woman who 
makes the best of the worst who gains and keeps 
up her reputation of being the greatest fascinator 
of her social circle. 

There are certain bald heads which seem 
almost shameful in their nakedness. For myself, 
222 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 

I am, as it were, as yet in my vest. But I can 
foresee a time when I, too, shall have to lose 
my modesty, since surely it is just as immodest 
to show a completely bald head in public as to 
exhibit a completely bare back. Then the 
problem will arise, shall I, or shall I not, wear 
a wig? And if so, when? Ah, that is always 
the great difficulty as we grow older! Nature 
is a jerry-builder at all times. The difficulty 
is, however, when we shall begin repairs and how 
much trouble is it worth our while to expend 
upon them, seeing that we only hold our bodies 
on an uncertain lease. After all, our personal 
appearance is surely something which is not 
exclusively our own personal affair. We don’t 
see ourselves half so often as other people see 
us. Their feelings, then, should surely be con¬ 
sidered. After all, if it be our duty to make 
this earth a happier place for our short sojourn 
upon it, is it not also our duty to make it as 
beautiful as we can? The trouble is that so 
many people — to return once more to the 
metaphor of the “ house ” — imagine that if 
they paint the windows a fresh colour and put 
stucco over those walls which are showing signs 
of wear and tear, the result is something that will 
look almost like a brand-new mansion. But 
223 


SOME CONFESSIONS 


alas!—as so often happens — the new paint 
and the stucco make the rest of the house look 
older and more dilapidated than ever! What 
then is to be done? 

But enough of metaphor. The question is: 
Shall we seek to hide the ravages of time, or 
shall we just grow fat and withered and bald- 
headed without active protest? It is a problem 
which has to be faced by every one when they 
approach what poets have termed the twilight 
of their lives. (That description is all wrong, 
of course, since twilight mellows many a physical 
blemish, whereas fifty-five is as clear as mid¬ 
day!) The young, of course, tell the ageing to 
grow old gracefully. But elderly people discover 
that the line is a very difficult one to keep which 
divides the too-pompous from the too-skittish. 
To grow old doesn’t make you feel at all grace¬ 
ful; on the contrary, it makes you feel annoyed, 
which is the arch-enemy of appearing calmly 
elegant. It’s a problem, moreover, which you 
can’t consider dispassionately — unless you are 
under twenty-five. Indeed, many people become 
“ panicky ” and rush out to buy an auburn 
transformation, or its equivalent in artifice. 
The trouble is that, though the hair be thin and 
grey, the mind beneath it is still quite glossy 
224 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 

and flaxen. If only our physical life went hand 
in hand with our “ heart/’ we should then see 
many a sexagenarian playing ping-pong with 
enjoyment and many a youth exhibiting in his 
club window a head as bald as a billiard ball and 
wave upon wave of billowing chins. No woman 
wants to paint her face; the question is, ought 
she to do it if it makes her look more present¬ 
able? Ought we not rather to thank her, instead 
of laughing at her? Ought she not rather to own 
it frankly and demand our gratitude, than do 
it in secret and hope for universal myopia? 
(Remember, I am only expounding the problem, 
not seeking to solve it.) Does there not come 
a time when Nature seems so careless of what 
was once her pride, that it becomes as well for us 
to ignore her disregard altogether and circum¬ 
vent her callousness by visiting the beauty 
parlours of Bond Street? After all, a woman is 
only really as old as her heart, and many a man 
could well play Pan whose hair fills the “ soul ” 
of even an optimistic hairdresser with despair. 
Ought we not to take it as a compliment when a 
woman goes through an operation (uncertain, 
alas!) to remove her wrinkles? Wrinkles are 
not beautiful things; do we, then, not owe it to 
our friends to get rid of them? Old age is no 
225 


SOME CONFESSIONS 

more a disgrace than rheumatoid arthritis. But 
we don’t wilfully exhibit our swollen joints to 
the world. Rather, we seek to hide them, not 
because we like to pretend they aren’t there, but 
because the art of friendship is the art of creat¬ 
ing an atmosphere of peace and beauty. On this 
account, how many people, perhaps, darken their 
fading eyelashes, rouge their yellowing cheek, 
and sport a wig? That the result is often more 
painful than the cause does not matter; it is the 
good intention that is important, and surely no 
one should be condemned because they “ meant 
it kindly.” Remember, such charitable frenzies 
seize us all at one time or another. Though 
people may hate us for them, by our “ good 
intentions ” alone do we feel ourselves supremely 
righteous! —so what matter? 


226 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 


Mysteries — Real and Manufactured 

T TUMAN nature is full of mysteries; but 
* they are not the kind of mysteries which 
make a great appeal to most people — perhaps, 
because they are so common, without, however, 
being really commonplace. The mystery of love, 
of friendship, or personality — these, for ex¬ 
ample, are sufficiently mysterious to rivet atten¬ 
tion all the time. But people infinitely prefer 
“ supernatural ” knockings, haunted houses, 
and every kind of occult tarradiddle. Every¬ 
thing is, I suppose, commonplace to the com¬ 
monplace mind, and there is nothing the com¬ 
monplace mind revels in more completely than a 
hint of the vulgar supernatural. It cannot be 
that life is so utterly banal that anything extraor¬ 
dinary — whether it be fact or fiction — is 
like a green oasis in a bleak desert. Life is mys¬ 
terious and is not at all banal — in fact, the mys¬ 
tery of a “ haunted house ” seems puerile by 
comparison. But most of us would far sooner 
investigate the mystery of a haunted house, 
which serves no useful purpose, than investigate 
227 


SOME CONFESSIONS 

the mystery of the “ abnormal,” the solution of 
which would be eminently useful. I suppose it is 
that the mysteries of life are all apt to remain 
mysteries, and that to lay a ghost is like reading 
a novel, wherein everything comes out right at 
the end, and life is presented to us, not as a 
tangle of unexplained problems, so much as a bit 
of architecture — the design of which anybody 
possessed of eyes can grasp. If each man could 
plan his own destiny, we should all of us be the 
hero or heroine of a happy-ever-afterwards 
chapter. As it is, we do certainly feel that we 
are living in a kind of a story, but we are 
dragged into it and dropped out of it for no 
conceivable reason. 

Most men, I fear, are Neros at heart. We all 
love to kill, sometimes for the mere sake of 
killing. At the same time we disguise our 
inclination under such high-sounding names as 
“ patriotism,” and “ sports,” “ justice,” “ re¬ 
ligion,” occasionally even in the name of God. 
Unfortunately for our peace of mind, though 
fortunately for civilization, the Deity, or evolu¬ 
tion, or some other mysterious agency, has 
evolved in our hearts something which, for want 
of a better explanation, men call “ conscience.” 
Thus, though we may still kill, we are occasion- 
228 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 


ally seized by moral qualms, and these qualms, 
alas! add a terrific spiritual conflict to our inner 
life. In books, however, we have no such misgiv¬ 
ings. The villain in a work of fiction is a villain 
without any extenuating circumstances whatso¬ 
ever. The chapter in which he at last meets his 
well-deserved violent end is the one chapter no 
reader will ever miss: the more violent his end, 
the more attention will the reader pay to 
the smallest detail. And yet, I suppose, if we 
really and truly and honestly analysed our own 
feelings we should find enthusiasm for his physi¬ 
cal debacle to be merely a subtlely expressed 
admiration for his villainy. We are always least 
tolerant over the sins we are quite capable of 
committing, and, the more violent our vengeance, 
the nearer we ourselves are to fall into like temp¬ 
tation. Otherwise, how account for the extraor¬ 
dinary vogue of murder stories, dramas of 
crime and seduction, and the eager manner in 
which the newspaper containing full details of 
some foul deed is sold out almost before the ink 
is dry? No one would like to live in the same 
street with a criminal, since he might easily 
choose us as his next victim; but once having 
escaped that danger, there is nothing about him 
that we would not all gladly know. The his- 
229 


SOME CONFESSIONS 


tory of his victim interests us so little. He or 
she might be possibly termed “ good,” and could 
anything make duller reading? But the history 
of the criminal himself, well, we gloat over it in 
a kind of unholy glee — the kind of unholy glee 
in which we read or listen to those stories of evils 
which, although we may not realize it, we really 
would relish to accomplish, too, providing, of 
course, that we might not be found out! I 
always think that murders should be placed in 
different categories, like lovers are. There is 
the Great Love which transcends the trumpery 
Right or the trumpery Wrong; there is also the 
Great Cause, which robs many a murder of its 
meanness. But all murderers are, as it were, 
bunched together, and every murderer is hanged. 
So the man who kills his enemy because he has 
deliberately ruined his life, and the man who 
kills another man merely to steal his watch, 
suffer the same penalty. Perhaps, in years to 
come, say in the millennium, justice will have 
the same nuances as the higher morality — that 
higher morality of which it is supposed to be the 
supreme defender. 

Who knows but that, in the same way as we 
are really thrilled by the uncivilized things we 
might so easily accomplish if we dared, we are 
230 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 


equally thrilled by any possibility of super¬ 
naturalness — because, deep down in our con¬ 
sciousness, we know that there is nothing for any 
of us beyond the materiality of this life? Do we 
only cheat ourselves — knowing full well, alas! 
that all the time we are being cheated, yet de¬ 
lighting in our illusion all the same? Again — 
who knows? That is the only reason I can find, 
however, for the popularity of the “ haunted 
house ” work of fiction. That we are all inter¬ 
ested in what we like to think of as real evidence 
of the supernatural is easy to understand; but 
that we should be equally interested in purely 
imaginary supernormal mysteries needs quite 
another explanation. 


231 


SOME CONFESSIONS 


The Law of Ill-Luck 

S AY what you will about good luck being 
primarily due to personal merit, the fact 
remains that ill-luck dogs the footsteps of some 
people out of all proportion to their deserts. 
There are certain men and women against whom 
the gods appear to have an insatiable grudge. 
All through their sad lives they are hunted down 
by disaster. Nothing goes right with them. And 
even when their bad fortune seems to have run 
itself out and a short period of calm follows 
in its train, it is not very long before some coin¬ 
cidence, so remarkable as to seem due more to 
some deliberately evil purpose than to mere 
chance, thrusts them back again once more into 
those tragic depths from which only the most 
heroic character can hope to emerge triumphant. 
Indeed, it would seem at times as if our happi¬ 
ness were really due to chance, and that our 
misery is caused by the deliberate machinations 
of some ruthless deity. Take the case of the 
totally incapacitated soldier. One would have 
232 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 


thought that, if the gods really had some say in 
the destiny of men, they would at least find pity 
for those poor human creatures who, through no 
fault of their own, are forced by circumstances 
to live out all that remains of their lives in that 
state which most of us would consider to be little 
better than a living death. And yet, I know 
from my own knowledge and experience that 
the original affliction of most of these men is as 
nothing to the pain and suffering which they now 
endure when, by all the laws of human kindness, 
the worst ought surely to be past and over. I 
am appalled by the number of badly wounded 
men whose wounds never really heal; who after 
leaving hospital, are struck down by consump¬ 
tion or nervous disorders almost too terrible to 
contemplate, who become insane, or whose fam¬ 
ily affairs take such a disastrous turn that, even 
without their wounds, the tragedy of their home- 
life would provide sufficient misery to cloud for¬ 
ever the lives of most of us. It seems like piling 
overwhelming disaster upon unbearable suffering 
in their sad case. It is the comfortable, I find, 
who believe most earnestly in the love of God. 
The marvel is that so many men and women can 
still kneel in prayer under the weight of un¬ 
merited trouble which Destiny has accorded to 
233 


SOME CONFESSIONS 

them as their lot in life. It would seem, indeed, as 
if Fate loved to be the first to hit the man who is 
down and out, and thoroughly to enjoy doing so. 
Whatever people may say, the gods are the 
greatest snobs, and in their fight with men rec¬ 
ognize no just law. They seemingly adore to 
carry coals to Newcastle and tantalize the tropi¬ 
cal regions by a volcano. It is amusing, too, to 
watch how we all try, as it were, to escape the 
eyes of tragic destiny. Indeed there seem long 
periods when destiny seems to have forgotten all 
about us. From the little backwater in which we 
hide the outlook seems so safe. Then one dreary 
day something happens which suddenly breaks 
up forever the even tenor of our lives. We are 
rudely hurled from our security into the mael¬ 
strom where men live and die fighting for their 
very breath. And nobody really escapes this 
sudden awakening from that torpor which some¬ 
times seems to us so near akin to happiness. 
Even those who, in order to escape, hide them¬ 
selves away in nunneries or monasteries pass 
through periods when the peacefulness of their 
inner life is rudely broken, and, beneath their 
calm exterior, thus live out some of those mental 
and spiritual torments of which Hell surely is 
composed. Perhaps no man who is really alive 
234 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 


is truly happy. Only the human turnips, living 
fatly in their serried and circumscribed rows, 
find that all is for the best in this best of all 
possible worlds 


235 


SOME CONFESSIONS 


The Inarticulate Majority 

rpHE art of keeping a good diary is as rare 
as the art of writing a good letter. Any¬ 
body can “ jot things down,” but few can make 
of these “ jottings down ” anything but so many 
extremely commonplace facts. As for the art of 
Letter-writing, it seems to be as lost as the art 
of Small Talk. The fact that “ Auntie came to 
tea to-day,” and that “ Papa is still suffering 
from gout,” conveys nothing of any interest to 
anybody. Yet such items compose the contents 
of, oh, so many letters, and so much of what 
people like to call a “ nice long friendly chat.” 
But if everybody kept a diary, and kept it really 
well, we should not need fiction to help to pass 
away our less occupied hours. For every life is a 
“ story,” but most people die with that story all 
untold. Sometimes they can’t even recognize 
it as a story themselves, just a preface to the 
other life. Were they able to do so, they would 
be of some real help to the rising generation. 
But they mostly go on groping aimlessly for¬ 
ward, the future a fog, and the past almost as 
236 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 

obscure. They may perhaps tell you the exact 
date when they first put their hair up, or when 
they were confirmed, or the circumstances of 
their first real kiss, in fact, anything which is as 
unilluminative as the dates of the kings of Eng¬ 
land. But what really would be interesting, as 
well as useful, would be to know exactly what 
were their innermost thoughts on each of these 
special occasions, since these things happen to 
everybody, and it is only the impressions which 
accompany them which make for differences, 
and thus for interest. But then, the queer char¬ 
acteristic of so many people is their utter inabil¬ 
ity to convey to others any clear impression of 
their real selves. They will imitate and repeat 
ad nauseam . In certain extreme instances, they 
will imitate and repeat so often that to echo 
seems to become at last their only natural func¬ 
tion. They know at least one language, but 
they cannot convey anything personal by its 
means, only something somebody else has said 
before them. So they use their gift of speech 
only to tell us what they have been doing, or 
what other people have been doing — facts 
which have only a very limited usefulness, help 
us on our way not at all, and entertain us 
rarely. For the most part, we have also done 
237 


SOME CONFESSIONS 


likewise. I verily believe that most people 
“ talk ” more when they are by themselves than 
at any other time, which is a pity, since if 
they would only talk as they really think, would 
anything be more thrilling than human society? 
Whereas ... ah well, perhaps I am a bit of a 
misanthrope! 

If only just a few people could write the real 
inner history of their lives, what a wonder-book 
even the dullest — outwardly dull, that is — 
life-story would be! There are heaps of biogra¬ 
phies which are interesting, but comparatively 
few which teach us very much of life. The 
writers are so intent upon telling us of the things 
they have done, the famous people they have 
known, that they have no space left to tell us of 
their own intimate philosophy. And every one 
has to think out his own philosophy, even though 
most seem fearful of explaining it. It is only 
when you catch a man in one of his unguarded 
moments that you realize what manner of man 
he is. For myself, I am old enough, happily, 
not to care what any man is, so long as he 
is something definite. It is the human “ echo,” 
the human “ gramophone record,” the human 
“ mask,” which make me infinitely prefer solj- 
tude to the company of the average human 
238 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 


being. Better to have done something one ought 
not to have done than apparently done nothing 
at all, and done it pompously. And better, far 
better, think reprehensible thoughts than seek 
security by thinking entirely with the crowd. 


239 


SOME CONFESSIONS 


The People we Dislike 

S O many people argue as if their prejudices 
were so many examples of pure logic, which 
they had arrived at after long hours of mental 
concentration. As a matter of fact prejudice 
is one of those subtle influences which sneak in 
where least expected, and colour our mental 
outlook with a “ drabness ” all their own. You 
will generally find the smart of a “ personal 
affront ” behind most prejudices — either that, 
or the egotistical inflation. If we might only 
disentangle our unreasonable prejudices from 
those arrived-at convictions for which we like to 
mistake them, we might then become so very 
wise, with that greatest wisdom of all, the wis¬ 
dom which realizes its own limitations. But 
nowhere are our prejudices more apparent than 
in our dealing with other people. Our likes and 
our dislikes, who can truthfully account for 
them? Very few among us! The trouble, how¬ 
ever, is that we often try to, and thereby we for 
the most part fail. Do we really admire the 
people who more clearly reflect ourselves, or 
240 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 

are our idols just those with whom we most 
agreeably disagree? Do we admire most the 
people who are our direct opposite, or do we dis¬ 
like them because they are not as we ourselves 
are? Certainly we shun most of all those vices, 
or rather those weaknesses, to which we our¬ 
selves are secretly addicted. We are usually 
blind to our virtues, whereas those “ virtues ” 
which are but vices verbally camouflaged, fill us 
with unshakable pride. A virtue which is con¬ 
scious of itself is rarely more than a moral recti¬ 
tude haunted by its own pretence. Thus, those 
people who possess virtues which we ourselves 
only inherit in a very qualified form, fill us with 
ecstatic enthusiasm. Usually the force of our 
emulation is in direct ratio to our natural desire 
to be just the opposite. According to the mean¬ 
ness of our worth do we prate about our high 
moral probity. We all practise auto-suggestion 
on ourselves, and those virtues of which a man 
boasts are generally those virtues to which he 
has not yet attained. Thus, to study a person’s 
prejudices is usually to understand, not what he 
is, but what he would like to be if he dared. The 
trouble, however, is that people will always mis¬ 
take their prejudices for sound logical conclu¬ 
sions, and expect their friends to be equally 
241 


SOME CONFESSIONS 


deceived. Tell me what a man hates, and I will 
tell you what that man wants to be. What he 
actually is can usually be measured, not by what 
he professes, but by those virtues in him to which 
he is supremely indifferent. 

And among all the prejudices which are 
camouflaged as moral convictions, the moral 
prejudices of Reformers — with a capital R — 
are usually the most vindictive. Now the 
trouble with most Reformers — spelt with a cap¬ 
ital R — is that they invariably desire to turn 
the world into a kind of glorified reformatory. 
Everybody, everything must be made exemplary 
at once. Or, if they can’t immediately be made 
good, then they must be kept from evil by the 
fright of punishment. In the mind of these men 
there is no such thing as evolution. The world 
must be made perfect as quickly as a conjurer 
does the “ rabbit trick.” They leave “ founda¬ 
tions ” to take care of themselves, being wholly 
engrossed in pulling down the edifice. But a 
jerry-built house is better than no home at all, 
and only the stupid man wilfully destroys that 
home which is bad before he has discovered an¬ 
other which is better. 


242 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 


The Devastating Propinquity of Married Life 

/CONSIDERING the devastating propinquity 
^ which convention imposes upon the mar¬ 
ried, the great wonder to me is that married life 
is not more often a kind of sullen truce between 
bored enemies, who only pretend friendship 
before the children and the servants. Never to 
be able to get away from the loved one, after the 
thrill of loving and being loved is over, is more 
the cause of irritation and discontent than any 
of those professed excuses by which married 
people explain the prosaic ending to their early 
ecstasy, both to each other as well as to the 
world. The failure of most marriages is founded, 
not on that “ incompatibility of temper,” that 
lack of mutual interests, that “ unfaithfulness,” 
which is the conventional explanation given and 
often believed, but on that very simple, but very 
potent fact that married people cannot get 
away from each other without offering a conven¬ 
tional reason for doing so or risking complete 
misunderstanding should they refrain. Love is a 
243 


SOME CONFESSIONS 

“ thrill,” but, alas! most young people so mis¬ 
understand the psychology of “ thrills ” that in 
the early years of their married life they work 
that “ thrill ” to death. There follows a period 
of shamed cessation, ending in the unacknowl¬ 
edged declaration that neither have any real 
“ thrills ” left to give the other. They are 
satiated; they are bored; for a time they are 
utterly weary of love and all that love may 
mean. Possibly there ensues friendship — a 
friendship symbolized in separate bedrooms. 
For the first time since the early period of their 
married life, they are comparatively happy. It 
is not that they love each other any the less, but 
it is a different kind of love; there is no pretence 
about it; neither of them is forced into the inti¬ 
macy of ecstasy without feeling at all ecstatic. 
They can become themselves once more; they 
can live a little more freely their own life. The 
husband does not feel that he is living at the end 
of a chain, as it were, the other end being in 
the hands of his wife, who will demand ex¬ 
planations if he slips his neck through the noose 
or even jerks at his fetters. The wife no longer 
feels that she is a sultana who awaits her lord 
in a harem of one, and is expected to be found 
reclining on her cushion from the time that the 
244 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 


husband returns from business in the evening 
until he departs again the next morning. 

Even then, matrimony is strewn with pitfalls. 
Men and women are, I know, gregarious crea¬ 
tures, but they are also creatures of well-nigh un¬ 
controllable moods — the most exigent of which 
is a periodical desire to be alone, to be free and 
untrammelled, to work off some inner conflict in 
solitude, far away from the interference of 
intimates. The conventions of married life 
recognize no such passing aberrations. The 
consequence is a conflict, the agony of which is 
acute, the memory of which echoes down the 
long passage of Time. Never to be able to get 
away from each other without long preliminary 
arrangements during which, in all probability, 
the desire to escape is assuaged — that simple 
fact is the cause of more married misery than 
any clash of opposing temperaments or wilful 
misunderstanding. The convention which in¬ 
sists that unmarried people should not share the 
same bedroom, but, once married, should never 
sleep apart without risk of “ talk ” in the 
servants’ hall, and inviting the possibility of a 
permanent estrangement between themselves, is 
the first and largest nail in the coffin of married 
love. It is, I suppose, a tradition handed down 
245 


SOME CONFESSIONS 

to us from the days when wives were the chattels 
of their husbands, and had to be prepared to play 
the woman whenever her husband felt inclined to 
recognize her sex. Which, of course, was con¬ 
venient for the husband, but loathsomely de¬ 
grading for the wife. Not unreasonably is the 
giving of herself by a woman spoken of as a 
“ supreme honour.” It is. But an honour 
obtained easily soon becomes a commonplace 
benefit. And this applies equally to men as well 
as to women. The moment love loses its mystery 
it loses its wonder. Familiarity breeds indiffer¬ 
ence, if not contempt, in other situations of 
intimate life than that of a master and his valet. 
Every woman desires to be loved passionately by 
the man she loves, but a woman who realizes 
that long custom has relegated her to the posi¬ 
tion of a hot-water bottle feels herself insulted, 
though no insult may be intended, and only a 
coarse convention is to be blamed. And the 
dangers arising out of such a situation are mani¬ 
fold. For no man, out of passionate love, can be 
faithful, should occasion arise; nor any woman 
— unless the ties of children and her own sense 
of womanly dignity counteract her purely human 
fancies. Most people fall readily in love, not 
because love is a blessing, but because it is an 
246 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 


“ adventure ” and they are utterly bored. The 
conventions of matrimony seem designed 
directly to kill that “ adventure.” They offer 
other “ adventures,” it is true — the “ adven¬ 
ture ” of having children; the “ adventure ” of 
making two financial ends meet, the “ adven¬ 
ture ” of sticking together and paddling a mutual 
canoe; but these are not “ adventures ” at all — 
at best they are but “ excursions ” which leave 
one utterly tired out and inwardly disappointed 
by the fact that realization as usual fell so far 
short of anticipation. The “ adventures ” of 
being husband and wife present far fewer 
difficulties than the “ adventure ” of being 
merely man and woman. And because con¬ 
vention does not recognize this as being an 
“ adventure ” at all, but merely a side-line in 
joy, like a kind of sanctified debauch, married 
life proves too often a disappointment to the 
married. Unmarried, convention imposes a too 
great fastidiousness; once married, it opposes 
all signs of delicacy or reserve. 

So few people seem to recognize the fact that, 
though a change of air is necessary for the health 
of the body, a certain amount of solitude is 
equally necessary to the health of the mind and 
spirit. Too long in the same place robs that 
247 


SOME CONFESSIONS 

place of its power to attract. In the same way, 
too long an intimacy with the same people re¬ 
veals at last nothing but their imperfections 
and the subtle half-understood realization that 
one is living in chains and that the chains are 
irksome. One must be supernaturally placid to 
guard one’s sweetness of temper confined day in 
day out, with the same people in the same room. 
A week of solitude would do most people more 
good than a dozen bottles of medicine. Until 
one is, as it were, in complete command of one’s 
own spiritual sanctuary, one always feels as if 
one were fighting the battle of life arrayed in 
paper armour. When one has always to give of 
oneself and give again and again, keeping on 
giving, there follows a spiritual and mental 
emptiness which some call “ boredom ” and some 
a “ disappointment with life.” But, in reality, 
people are not bored, they are not disappointed. 
The truth is that they seem to have mislaid 
themselves, lost their individuality in a too-long 
attempt to dove-tail their own idiosyncrasies 
into the idiosyncrasies of those with whom they 
are forced to live. We always hate secretly 
those whom we have found out and those who 
have found us out in their turn — when there is 
no forgiveness on either side. The conventions 
248 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 


of matrimony encourage that sad discovery 
within a twelve-month. A not-too-lengthy ab¬ 
sence does indeed make the heart grow fonder, 
but, of infinitely more value — it places the vir¬ 
tues of the departed in a high light. Distance 
lends enchantment to the absent, just as it does 
to a factory chimney. If no man is a hero to his 
own valet, what indeed must he look to his own 
wife? We must need surround ourselves by a 
kind of glamour if we would keep love; but how 
is it possible to preserve that “ glamour ” when 
day in day out and nearly all day long one 
must live and sleep in such close intimacy with 
another that we may not snore, we may not feel 
“ fed up/’ we may not feel ill-tempered, morose, 
or “ below par ” without being found out. The 
axiom to guard a little of oneself for oneself 
alone, if one would be loved for ever, is impos¬ 
sible when one lives so everlastingly “ on view ” 
that even those things of which we feel ashamed 
and would hide from prying eyes, are openly 
exhibited for all those who see to chronicle. The 
reason that a man is so often faithful longer to 
his mistress than to his wife, as a woman is 
longer faithful to her lover than to her husband, 
is because they see each other more rarely and 
so obtain that solitude in which their minds and 
249 


SOME CONFESSIONS 


hearts may develop, and, giving of themselves 
to the loved-one at last, they may have some¬ 
thing fresh to give, not a threadbare edition 
of those fascinating qualities which too quickly 
become stale because they were employed 
too often. Thus the interludes of spiritual 
and mental dullness — which we all of us go 
through — will not dim the glamour of their 
love. 


250 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 


The “ Secret ” we can never Impart 

TF only we might play occasionally the role of 
* director of our own destiny — how much 
more effective we would make the story which is 
our life! The ways of God are so often in¬ 
scrutable, that there seems to us at times to be 
no design in them whatsoever. Sometimes in 
our despair we cling to the faith which tells us 
that after death all will be made clear. And 
yet the doubt lingers in our hearts that this en¬ 
lightenment will require the supernatural power 
of a miracle to smooth out the spiritual rough¬ 
ness of our thwarted earthly desires. I some¬ 
times think that the reason why fiction is so 
popular is not because fiction ever teaches the 
reader anything vital about life, but it satisfies 
him by its efforts to show Divine Justice the 
proper way to go about its business. In books, 
everything happens before it is too late, and 
usually in just the most satisfactory kind of 
manner. There may be “ floods of tears ” for a 
long while, but sooner or later they dry up; the 
wicked people are properly punished and the 
251 


SOME CONFESSIONS 

good suitably rewarded. In fact, everything 
comes right after having been wrong for at least 
three hundred pages. Fiction is, indeed, a kind 
of brief holiday away from the actual — and, as 
such, is at all times refreshing. It is, as it were, 
the “ fairy tale ” which one lonely person tells to 
others, equally lonely. Happy people don’t, as a 
rule, devour novels. Their lives are sufficiently 
entertaining. They are the desolate who thrill 
to the justice of this purely imaginary world. In 
real life, justice seems such a very haphazard 
affair. It is always an even chance if one be 
punished for one’s own inherited weaknesses; 
whether one be rewarded for one’s good inten¬ 
tions or merely for those bad ones which nobody 
ever found out. Happy circumstances surround 
certain people, while others have “ crosses ” 
piled upon them. Those who desire life are 
struck down, and those who yearn for the forget¬ 
fulness of oblivion live to be centenarians. If 
only we knew the “ reason why ” we might be¬ 
come more philosophical. As it is, we are often 
exasperated because there seems no rhyme nor 
reason in so many things at all — and “ Kismet ” 
is the surrender-cry of those who have grown 
weary of finding arguments for the inscrutable 
working of their fate. The Best within us is too 
252 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 


often like a flower withering in darkness, while 
the Worst never fades for lack of opportunity to 
develop. As men and women pass us continually 
like a human procession, certain members of 
which dart out from the classified ranks in which 
they march, to clasp our hands in friendship and 
understanding, so opportunities parade them¬ 
selves perpetually before us — though it is often 
only those to which we yearn to turn a blind eye 
which come to us in all their most alluring aspect. 
Other people see them not — they are no temp¬ 
tation to them. But they single us out to tanta¬ 
lize us forever by their presence, until life 
becomes one long fight against enemies only 
visible to ourselves: we yearn for respite, while 
knowing only too clearly that there will never 
be a respite so long as we live and breathe and 
have our human being. So in our inner despair 
we turn to God — since God is only a living God 
to the desolate, the tired, and the lonely. The 
others are quite satisfied by life. If they worship 
a Being above and beyond themselves, it is often 
through fear that He may perchance rob them 
of that fortunate existence, or mar its blessings 
by some tragic untoward circumstance. But the 
desolate, the tired, and the lonely know that 
they have “ touched rock bottom ” and until 
253 


SOME CONFESSIONS 


one has touched rock bottom one has only an 
academic and theoretical need of anything be¬ 
yond the fleshpots of Egypt. God is the 
“ Dream ” to which the unhappy turn when 
destiny has made dreaming the only happy cir¬ 
cumstance in life, the only faint shadow of 
happiness into which Reality cannot thrust its 
talons — to tear asunder all that we hold most 
dear. And some seek Him in churches — not as 
members of that best-dressed procession who, as 
it were, pay a polite “ call ” upon Him on Sun¬ 
day morning, but as those who go there to pray 
when they know that His House will be deserted 
and there will be not obsolete dogma, nor me¬ 
chanically conducted service, nor the disturbing 
influence of the human crowd, to come between 
them and the One from whom they seek consola¬ 
tion. And some find Him in Nature, in Art and 
Music, in Beauty in all its manifestations; in 
unobtrusive “ good work ” and solitude where¬ 
soever they may find it. 

And some time or other, in the life of each one 
of us, there comes a period when Fate, in league 
with our enemies, seems to have planned to make 
our history a concentrated morsel of tragic-farce, 
with all the tragedy revealed only to our own 
consciousness and all the “ farce ” only in the 
254 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 


consciousness of other people. It is then that 
we yearn, more than anything else, to sneak 
away and hide ourselves. We retire when we 
can from the wilderness which seems to surround 
us, into that green oasis which lies within us and 
which few things untoward seem able to disturb. 
There it is that we find a renewed spiritual force 
by the strength of which we can return again to 
the field of battle, there to fight on and on. It 
is a blessed and very wonderful moment — this 
moment when outrageous fate thrusts us back 
upon ourselves to discover within our own hearts 
a peace which can never afterwards be de¬ 
stroyed. But it takes a long succession of angry 
blows before we seek this sanctuary within our¬ 
selves. But seek it we always have to, at some 
time or another; and find it we generally do, 
though we find it only through tears. At last 
there comes a day when things have gone so 
wrong that we are henceforth indifferent to their 
progress. We cease any longer to struggle 
against the evil fate which dogs our footsteps. 
Then it is that the wonderjul thing happens. 
We think that we can never be really happy 
again; when lo and behold! happiness returns to 
us. It may not be that kind of happiness which 
we called “ happiness ” before the clouds gath- 
255 


SOME CONFESSIONS 


ered and the storm burst; but there is in it a 
peace, a cessation from vain hopes, which com¬ 
forts us more than we can express. Almost it 
would seem that we can shrug our shoulders at 
whatever may befall us in the future. We have 
learned a secret; we have found a sanctuary 
which only death itself can disturb — and which 
death, we hope, will make forever permanent. 
Some call it “ God ”; some philosophy; most of 
us can never give it a name. Now it would seem 
that we have ceased to be blinded merely by 
“ superficialities,” that we have the power to see 
right through them into the very heart of 
things. We see the loveliness of Nature through 
new eyes, and the meaning of life, even though 
we yet may not fully understand it, possesses a 
significance which comes to us as a new revela¬ 
tion. Let the world rage how it will; let Destiny 
stalk us like an infuriated huntsman — we have 
ceased to care. Within us there is an everlasting 
peace which looks on unafraid and mockingly. 
Those who have lived out their lives to its dregs 
will understand what I mean. Mostly we cannot 
talk of it — it is too precious to be described by 
words. It is just a “ secret ” that we can never 
impart. 


256 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 


The Religion of the Average Man 

T WAS brought up on the Christian faith—* 
* Church of England denomination. I was told 
the Bible stories. I went to Sunday School — 
learning parrot-wise the Collect, Gospel and 
Epistle for each week. Now, as I look back 
upon those days, I see that this enforced visit 
was due principally to my parents 7 desire to get 
their children out of the house for a space, rather 
than to a belief that they would be morally bene¬ 
fited thereby. Naturally, being a child, I hated 
both Sunday and Sunday School. I associated 
the day with stiff clean collars, Eton suits, and 
four hours, divided into two parts, of complete, 
unmitigated boredom — called Morning and 
Evening Service. Every morning my mother 
read three short prayers in the dining-room — 
her children kneeling on the floor with their 
heads buried in easy-chairs, and the servants 
ranged round the wall in various attitudes of 
vacant immobility. During these daily periods 
of thanksgiving or beseeching, I studied uphols¬ 
tery far more intently than I listened to the 
257 


SOME CONFESSIONS 


Word of God, and a fly settling on the “furni¬ 
ture plush ” with which the chairs were covered 
was an “ event ” far more exciting than the rais¬ 
ing of Lazarus from the dead. God, to my child¬ 
ish imagination, was an old man perpetually 
angry with His children. I never doubted for an 
instant His reality, nor wondered at His anger. 
I took Him for granted — prayed to Him when 
I must; thanked Him when I was told, and asso¬ 
ciated His desires with all the dullest moments 
of my child-life. I said I loved Him — because 
to own indifference would, I felt assured, have 
brought down His vengeance upon my head. In 
reality I had no need of Him. I was a child, 
healthy, brought up in fairly comfortable cir¬ 
cumstances. If He were associated with any¬ 
thing in my childish mind, He was associated 
with all those things least agreeable — death, 
funerals, hell, church service, Sunday School, 
peevish old people, nightmares, and learning the 
Collect, Epistle and Gospel each week by heart. 
I bore with Him as I bore with learning lessons, 
Sunday clothes and long sermons, resigned to the 
inevitable, and so familiar with it as to neither 
question its necessity nor protest against it. 

Briefly, religion was just a tiresome observ¬ 
ance, and God some one far away, yet always 
258 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 


near at hand when least wanted. Some one to 
be propitiated at all times and prayed to occa¬ 
sionally. Never, however, was He a reality — 
unless I happened to have done wrong; and as 
for religion — it was something kept for the five 
minutes preceding breakfast and bedtime, and 
all day on Sunday. If there was any moment 
when religion became an actuality, it was during 
the hymns — the words of which I did not 
trouble to understand, but the melodies of which 
filled my young heart with gladness, sometimes 
making my childish imagination soar to celestial 
heights where I stood among the angels in a 
garden something like the one surrounding my 
own home — a home, however, where there were 
no lessons or other unpleasant occupations, but 
games all day long and universal happiness 
everywhere. 

Thus it is that to-day, when I am grown up, 
the music of such hymns as “ Jesus, Lover of my 
soul,” “ Abide with me,” and “ The sower went 
forth sowing,” bring back to me the ecstasy of 
childhood more vividly than any other youthful 
association. These favourite old hymns were, 
indeed, the only actual living force of my re¬ 
ligion. The Bible, Sunday services, the Word of 
God as it was propounded to me by my parents, 
259 


SOME CONFESSIONS 


and later on at school, were all associated with 
boredom — dull, lifeless periods; enforced gloom 
cast on a nature habitually sunny. 

And this, I believe, is the experience of most 
children. Religion as a practical code, as a 
beautiful faith to inspire each action of the 
humdrum daily round, was unimaginable — 
since it was never pointed out. Words . . . 
words . . . words — that was all it meant to me; 
all it means to the vast majority of children. 
Rarely was it associated with bright and happy 
things, with beauty and joy — those facts which 
appeal so greatly to children. If God was linked 
with any important earthly thing, He was linked 
with “ don’t ” and with fairy stories — not half 
so enchanting as Cinderella and Jack and the 
Beanstalk — “ true ” stories, which children are 
still being told, nor do they yet doubt their 
truth, since grown-up people are thus the more 
secure of Divine approbation. And children, 
even now, accept this interpretation of Bible 
stories because they are given no other. Parents 
are still incurable opportunists and time-servers 
in regard to religion. 

Looking back on my own childhood, and con¬ 
sidering myself to have been an average child, it 
seems to me that one of the saddest experiences 
260 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 

of that period was my childish effort to reconcile 
the religion my elders taught me with the re¬ 
ligion I observed they practised among them¬ 
selves. Not that the realization was particularly 
clear; rather it was a state of semi-conscious 
“ puzzlement ” — a state which alienated God 
and religion from all acts performed during the 
six days of the week and brought them into line 
on Sundays only. Gradually there was borne 
upon my childish mind the fact that what was 
essential for children in regard to keeping the 
Word of God, could quite well be neglected by 
grown-up people without the least risk of falling 
from grace. To lie was sinful, but to say “ not 
at home ” when somebody called at the wrong 
time, was not apparently a lie at all — or at least 
one far removed from anything likely to call 
down the anger of God upon one’s head, as, for 
example, denying that one stole a spoonful of 
strawberry jam, or declaring one had been io 
Sunday School when one had gone for a happy 
walk instead. As a child it made me simply long 
to be grown up. Once grown up I fancied I 
could quite easily pretend illness and walk out 
of church before the sermon, even if I went to 
church at all — which seemed a purely voluntary 
action. Being grown up obviated the necessity 
261 


SOME CONFESSIONS 


of even saying prayers on a cold night before 
getting into bed. Certainly grown-up people 
found it quite unnecessary to their salvation to 
learn the Collect, and seemingly they could 
swear without the least impunity. Though toys 
were locked away in the nursery and only hymn 
tunes allowed on the piano, grown-up people 
could play whist, providing the Rector did not 
know, and “ keeping holy the Sabbath day ” did 
not apparently apply to coachmen, servants, or 
prevent a furtive game of tennis by their em¬ 
ployers, providing the tennis lawn was not 
within view of the road. Only semi-consciously, 
I say, did I realize these two varying codes of 
religious observance, but even with the half¬ 
consciousness with which I observed them, I felt 
an ever-growing dislike of religion, since all the 
dull parts of it appeared only to apply to me — 
because I was a child. As I said before, practical 
Christianity was not taught me, only the dreary 
routine of dreary observances — complying with 
which I must need also call myself a “ miserable 
sinner ” and act as such — provided also I pulled 
up my trouser-legs before kneeling down, and 
got up from my knees when other people did. 

Now that I am grown-up I never cease from 
feeling amazement that parents should still con- 
262 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 


tinue to teach their children Biblical stories in 
which they have long since ceased to believe 
themselves. Probably they think it doesn’t mat¬ 
ter; that, in any case their children will come to 
no harm when they discover eventually that 
much they had been taught as true, turns out in 
reality to be merely “ legend,” with all the mir¬ 
aculous falsity of most legends. But I do believe 
that that period of violent atheism which most 
young people go through about the age of twenty 
— a period which can have such devastating 
effect on their inner life — is principally due to 
the fact that they have been told so many Bibli¬ 
cal “ tarradiddles ” were inspired by God Him¬ 
self that, when they begin to doubt them, and to 
find that those people who told them have not 
believed in them themselves for years, they sud¬ 
denly discard religion altogether and fight it 
with all the fury of those who realize that they 
have been bamboozled. To deny God makes 
them feel grown-up; it is also a method by which 
they may revenge themselves on their elders who 
too long deceived them. From the age of twenty 
to the age of thirty is usually the period of 
youthful blasphemy. There is no God, and thus 
every religious rite is rank foolishness — against 
which Youth will wage perpetual warfare. Any 
263 


SOME CONFESSIONS 

falsehood which is told to children as a truthful 
fact, is a deliberate crime against the most trust¬ 
ful, the most hopeful and most sincere period of 
a man’s life. The “ spirit ” which animates re¬ 
ligious belief is never explained to them. On the 
contrary they are merely given so many unessen¬ 
tial facts, masquerading as articles of faith 
necessary to salvation, that when the moment 
arrives and the young mind begins to question, 
to make discoveries for itself, the anger which 
these questions and discoveries arouse, not only 
undermines any particles of spiritual beauty 
which religion may have revealed to them, but 
turns them deliberately into fierce antagonists of 
all things appertaining to the life of the “ soul.” 
They have been stuffed with creeds,, and these 
creeds have taught them no philosophy of con¬ 
duct. So they start their adult life, not only 
without any religion whatever, but with a fury 
against all those people and institutions which 
have religion for their inspiration. And the 
inner loneliness of Youth which has discovered 
that there is no God, is a loneliness never 
equalled in tragic solitude during any subsequent 
period of life. So they become materialists in 
the worst sense. It is not their fault. Their 
parents and teachers have spent years in pav- 
264 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 


ing the way. Atheism is but the aftermath 
of these misdirected efforts. Youth is their 
victim. 

In its anger against what has been taught 
as “ religion ” youth sometimes finds itself 
in open conflict with a certain section of 
the world. Some young people conform out¬ 
wardly and live at peace; but most — and youth 
is ever the period of insurgence — wage cease¬ 
less warfare, not only against the Church, which 
seems to them to represent so much hypocrisy, 
but also against those of its ministers whom 
Youth, in its unreason, believes to batten upon 
these falsehoods, this dishonest leadership of the 
ignorant. I often wonder whether the Churches 
ever ask themselves why the congregation which 
frequents them is so often composed of either 
very young or very old people. There are so 
few among them in the early-middle or later- 
middle life. The cynic will of course assert that 
the former attend because they must, the latter 
because they are becoming afraid. But the real 
significance goes much deeper than that. The 
revolt by young people against the false religion 
they were taught when children usually lasts for 
ten or twenty years. After that they begin to 
find that real religion, which is to comfort and 
265 


SOME CONFESSIONS 

inspire them in their old age, is a religion 
founded, not on any creed, still less on any 
dogma, but on the need of the soul to satisfy its 
longing for some faith above and beyond the 
physical appetites, a longing which seeks also to 
find expression in purely human acts. It is the 
religion without a Church, founded on experi¬ 
ence alone, and on those evidences of some 
Divine regard which are occasionally revealed to 
all feeling men and women as they journey 
through life. The pageantry of the seasons; 
Nature in all her loveliness, in all her moods; 
the kindness of the poor to poorer people; the 
silent acts of heroism which suffering and loss 
bring forth; true charity which seeks to cover up 
its own tracks; the trustful innocence of little 
children; music, poetry, the arts; the love of 
friends; the love of man and woman; the well- 
nigh miraculous courage of the humble; the 
kindly feeling which in a world of callous indif¬ 
ference runs like a thread of pure gold — these 
are, to my mind, greater evidence of the God¬ 
head in man, the Divine creation of the world 
than all the warring creeds, the dogmas, the 
religious rites, the whole library of “ inspired 
books,” every statement that seeks to reveal the 
reality of God to His children. So I do not seek 
266 



OF AN AVERAGE MAN 


for Him in the places dedicated to worship of 
Him. My temple — if you can call it a “ tem¬ 
ple ” — is in the world of men and women, in the 
wide open spaces of the earth. 

There alone do I find a practical answer to my 
questioning; there alone do I find some founda¬ 
tion for my faith. Such a “ religion ” cares 
naught if the Bible be inspired by God or merely 
compiled through centuries of time by men 
themselves; if Christ be really Divine, or 
merely a man of God-like attributes; if belief 
in the Trinity, in the Resurrection, in the Atone¬ 
ment be necessary or unimportant. Perhaps it 
is not a “ religion ” at all, but merely a philoso¬ 
phy of conduct, inspired by a definite, if impos¬ 
sible, ideal. In any case it draws no comfort 
from any dogmatic assertion of Life after Death. 
It recognizes a Life on earth and how gloriously 
alike to Heaven it could be made if only the 
World — and in that world I of course include 
myself — could realize practically even eighty 
per cent of that ideal. I hold no theory concern¬ 
ing the Life hereafter. I cannot — no matter 
how earnestly I will. But life, here on earth, is 
an actuality. To waste it in merely a prayerful 
self-preparation for another, is to my mind a loss 
of a divine opportunity. In however small and 
267 


SOME CONFESSIONS 


incompetent a way a man may strive to realize 
his ideal state here on earth, he will surely have 
done all that God can require of him, should 
there be a God. At any rate he will be able then 
to look his Maker in the face — and that to my 
mind is better than to go towards Him grovelling 
and suppliant. It gives to a man pride in his 
human destiny. And human life is surely some¬ 
thing more than a long submissive cajoling of 
those who guard the portals of some far-off 
heaven. Heaven is here around us — or it can 
be, in however small an extent, if we try to make 
it a reality. 

But the majority of men and women do not 
arrive at this religion-without-dogma until they 
have passed many miserable years of grave 
doubt, sometimes in active revolt against the 
preaching of the Churches. Life and experience 
seem to have shown them that the God of Love 
they are expected to worship is non-existent. No 
such God, they say to themselves, could allow 
the cruelty and injustice of the world to go on 
unrevenged. Man, as they watch and observe 
him and have their dealings with him, is far too 
imperfect a creature ever to be called a direct 
inheritor of the kingdom of heaven. Thus to 
entitle him is to elevate him far beyond any 
268 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 


evidence of his deserts — either that, or to de¬ 
base a divine perfection. 

Nor do the Churches seem able to keep their 
Christian ideal perpetually before the eyes of 
men — by giving them those examples of love, 
charity and forgiveness which, if there be a God, 
must surely rank among His first commands. 
To be mixed up with professed religion is to feel 
oneself mixed up in a game of hocus-pocus, in 
which the method of worship seems to signify 
little of that spirit which should rightly animate 
an act of adoration. Dogma and ritual seem to 
have come between Christ and the vast multi¬ 
tude of men and women who would seek His 
consolation in those temples erected for His 
worship. The God men find in the Churches is a 
God that the world outside has outgrown. They 
will not accept the God of the Old Testament — 
since He seems no God at all but rather the per¬ 
sonification of all those acts of selfishness and 
revenge which make the human world such a 
wilderness of despair too often. And the Christ 
of the New Testament — that gentle, lowly, all- 
loving, all-forgiving divinity — seems nowhere 
to be found in this mixture of inward mysticism 
and outward magnificence. He lives in the 
world outside — in the thousand-and-one acts of 
269 


SOME CONFESSIONS 

generosity, courage, true Christian charity, 
which run like a thread of pure gold through 
men’s intercourse with his brother-men. A hos¬ 
pital ward seems to be fuller of the presence of 
God than those Divine services which preach the 
selfsame dogma, perform the selfsame elaborate 
rituals daily in glorification of His name. It is 
among men, and not in the Churches, where the 
presence of Christ is more apparent. The divine 
courage with which so many people face suffer¬ 
ing and disaster; the thousand-and-one acts of 
kindness we receive from our brother men and 
women throughout life; the kindness of the poor 
to the poor; the helpful sympathy which so many 
people give ungrudgingly and gladly to those less 
fortunate than themselves — these bring us far 
clearer evidence of the spark of divinity animat¬ 
ing men’s souls than all the professed “ divine 
revelation ” to believe in which the Churches 
declare alone they may be “ saved.” This is the 
faith which buoys up the spirits of the average 
man. He views the quarrels of the Churches 
over hair-splitting definitions of the professed 
Words of God with indifference, if not with dis¬ 
dain. He goes out into the world of men — an 
atheist maybe, in the eyes of Religion, but with 
a belief in the innate goodness of other men, 
270 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 

taken in the aggregate, which needs no dogmatic 
assertion. He sees that in the heart of humanity 
there is a spark of something divine which will at 
length, and at last, make the world of men 
worthy of their heavenly birthright. In religion, 
as it is preached in the Churches, he only finds a 
tyrannical uncharitableness which would elevate 
the God of Anger above the God of Love. But 
the God of Love is the only God he finds it in 
his heart to worship. He discovers in the 
Churches, for example, that the best seats are 
reserved for the “ best people,” and the poor are 
conveniently thrust into the back pews. He 
hears a priest repeating in a sing-song tone 
prayers and exhortations which have been re¬ 
peated so often, and listened to so continually 
that they seem to have lost, both for the priest 
and his congregation, any actual significance. He 
hears passages read from the Bible — the lust 
and vindictiveness of which fill him with disgust. 
He watches some more or less meaningless ritual 
performed as if it were necessary to salvation, 
not only to perform, but also to regard. He dis¬ 
covers that the Churches are, for the most part, 
identified with ideas and practices which for the 
modern man have little or no interest, and less 
importance. As he watches their perpetual war- 
271 


SOME CONFESSIONS 

fare over those questions which can have not 
the least influence on conduct — which, after all, 
is the only means by which religion may prove 
its reality — he becomes conscious of the fact 
that he has moved out of the world in which the 
Churches were born and are, apparently, still 
living. It is not that men have deliberately left 
the Churches to indulge in greater selfishness 
and sin; but they have completely outgrown 
them. Education and the discovery of science 
have advanced humanity immeasurably; but the 
Churches, instead of welcoming this greater 
knowledge, these vital discoveries, have dis¬ 
owned them where they could; —not because 
they were sinful, but because they undermined 
some trivial incident in the Bible which they had 
for centuries declared to be evidence of divine 
creation. To the average man, the Churches are 
but remnants of some decaying city which has 
lived beyond its period of active usefulness, be¬ 
cause it has lost touch with the aspirations and 
problems which animate and vex men's hearts 
in the modern world. The Average Man asks 
for some practical evidence from the Churches of 
that Christian understanding and helpfulness for 
which they should stand, and he is given so many 
symbols as meaningless to him as a hieroglyphic 
272 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 

on an Egyptian tomb. He suspects that the 
Churches are far more interested in their own 
magnificent self-importance than in the world 
which they should rightly serve as well as lead. 
In all those urgent reforms which would add so 
greatly to the happiness of mankind, he finds the 
Churches playing, more or less, a reactionary 
part. After nearly two thousand years of Chris¬ 
tianity he found that he was asked to sacrifice 
his own life and the lives of his sons in a war — 
the greatest that the world has so far known. 
He finds the Protestant and Roman Catholic 
Churches perpetually warring against each other 
— not because either of them encourages hu¬ 
manity to sink below those ideals which both 
religions have set up for man’s inspiration, but 
simply because, to give but a single instance, 
the Protestant Church ignores the divinity of 
the Virgin Mother of Christ, and the Roman 
Catholic insists thereon. The Average Man says 
within his own heart, that in either case it really 
does not matter. Probably he denies that she 
was a virgin at all — nor does he feel any less 
respect for her because she was merely a woman 
like his wife or his mother. But briefly, he can¬ 
not be troubled by those things which are to him 
so glaringly unessential to the welfare and hap- 
273 


SOME CONFESSIONS 

piness of human life, and to the fulfilling of those 
divine injunctions which Christ gave the world 
so wonderfully, those injunctions by which alone 
mankind will raise himself above the level of the 
beasts and prove himself worthy of any wider 
life after death. If the average man has any 
professed religion to-day, it is the religion of 
Christian democracy. And because ancient 
religions have proved themselves in the long 
ago, and still prove themselves to-day, so furi¬ 
ously undemocratic, he leaves professed religion 
severely alone and lives out his own interpreta¬ 
tion of the divine ideal as he can make it practi¬ 
cal in his daily life. He will return to the 
Church when the Church places itself in the van¬ 
guard of human progress. He will return to the 
Church, when he can hope to find there no 
longer the violent assertions of scientifically dis¬ 
proved dogma, the perpetual performance of 
empty rituals; he will give his services when he 
sees the clergy coming forth into the world to 
live the lives of men working among other men, 
no longer in the capacity of schoolmasters, but 
as embodiments of practical helpfulness, encour¬ 
agement, charity and true manliness. He will 
attend religious services when the services will 
include everything that is beautiful in art, music 
274 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 

and literature, no matter how unsectarian may 
be their origin. He will come back to the 
Churches when the Churches stand together as 
one Church, vigorous defenders of the human 
defenceless, no matter of what race or creed; 
inspired by one universal mighty effort to bring 
justice everywhere throughout the earth; one 
supreme fight to make of human life no mere 
selfish preparation for a problematical heaven, 
but an existence showing something of heaven 
itself here upon earth. He wants his Church to 
be the figure-head of all that appertains to social 
progress; a Church in which every beautiful, un¬ 
selfish achievement and act will be considered 
“ sacred ”; a Church which will forget its the¬ 
ology and dogma, and live only for the emanci¬ 
pation of humanity from those many evils from 
which it has suffered so cruelly throughout the 
ages. 

Wherever he finds this ideal — to it the Aver¬ 
age Man gives his whole-hearted worship. In 
that he now often disowns the God as proclaimed 
in the Churches — it may be said that he dis¬ 
owns Him only to find Him over again for him¬ 
self. God creeps back into his heart — just 
when he has become accustomed to declare that 
there is no God at all, because religions have dis- 
275 


SOME CONFESSIONS 

gusted him with their interpretations. Dogma 
he will not have, nor theology, nor any belief 
that religion is a kind of never-ending propitiat¬ 
ing of some egotistical deity. He knows that 
everything that is beautiful, charitable, un¬ 
selfish, heroic; everything which makes for the 
happiness and betterment of mankind in general, 
is not only divinely inspired, but “ sacred ” in 
the eyes of the Most High. He knows that re¬ 
ligion should be the most modern thing on earth, 
in that it seeks unceasingly for greater knowl¬ 
edge. He knows that religion is not so much a 
creed as an inspired championship of the de¬ 
fenceless, the weak and the suffering. In his 
mind, nothing is necessary to that religion but 
the simple fact that where there is misery it must 
be assuaged; where there is wrong, it must be 
righted; where there is a chance of human prog¬ 
ress, the means must be fought for with all the 
strength and determination at command. Noth¬ 
ing shall be allowed to stand in the way of these 
things — no tradition, no prejudice, no scientifi¬ 
cally disproved belief. The earth must be made 
a place where men laugh more often than they 
weep; where they may find happiness and enjoy¬ 
ment more often than renunciation and despair; 
where each man is given the selfsame chance — 
276 


OF AN AVERAGE MAN 


and the best man wins; where there are no 
slums, nor warfare, indecent poverty, nor inde¬ 
cent riches; a place where, when the Last Day 
dawns, men can bravely face their Creator — 
proud that the gifts which He has given them — 
the gifts of intelligence, loving-kindness and 
“ vision ” — have not been neglected, nor 
wasted, but have been gloriously fulfilled. 

The religion of the Average Man is the re¬ 
ligion of humanity — he can conceive no greater 
nor more inspiring creed than that. His God is 
a practical God. He is a God who neither hides 
Himself away in mystery, nor deliberately inter¬ 
feres with human conduct — either for good or 
ill. He is a God who has given His children the 
means to work out their own salvation. Within 
the heart of each one of us there is a “ still small 
voice ” which speaks of some divine creation 
louder than all the dogmatic assertions of the 
Churches. It is this “ still small voice ” which 
to the Average Man is — God. It is the spirit 
within him which inspires him to do for himself 
all that religious faith leaves to some supernat¬ 
ural Power to accomplish. The knowledge fills 
him with pride. It subdues the question as to 
whether there be a'God or no; if He be all- 
loving, all-powerful — an ultimate Judge, upon 
277 


SOME CONFESSIONS 

whose forgiveness he can rely. He just goes on 
his way, proud in the fact that humanity has 
within its own heart the power eventually to 
work out its own most glorious destiny, and 
prove itself worthy of its divine creation. If 
there be no God outside this spirit, yet the 
knowledge that he possesses this spiritual force 
spurs him onward to perform, in his humble, 
obscure way, the part of Him who, if He exists, 
would be truly divine. 

As Henley, the poet, wrote:— 

. . . Need we care 
What is to come? 

... We have fulfilled ourselves, and we can dare 
And we can conquer, though we may not share 
In the rich quiet of the afterglow. 

Speaking personally, I am firmly convinced 
that there ought to be a God, and a life here¬ 
after. But my faith in these two facts is par¬ 
alysed by the haunting doubt that neither may 
be a reality after all. On the whole, I believe 
that the best way to face such a doubt is not to 
think about it at all, or as little as we may. 
Truly, the one great question which really con¬ 
cerns us, and most certainly concerns God — if 
there be a God — in his relation to ourselves, is 
this Life and what we do in the world. Don’t 
278 



OF AN AVERAGE MAN 


ask yourself over and over again if there be a 
God, act as if He really and truly existed, and 
just so far as it is possible for you, play His part 
on earth, then all will surely be well with your 
immortal soul. And if the reward of it all — if 
reward you seek — be but a sleep eternal, do 
not weep. If you have done your very best, you 
will have left the world happier and better and 
more beautiful for your brief sojourn therein. 
And surely no God can ask of His children a 
greater evidence of their love. 


THE END. 


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